Nationwide Commercial Analysis

No matter where children are or what they are doing they’ll always find some sort of advertisements. It can be when their casually watching television, reading a magazine or just playing games on their computer. Advertisements are different forms of communication whose purpose is to make their product known to the public. Marketers aren’t partial to certain people; they target anyone and every age group, but recently there has been an upsurge of advertisements aimed towards children. In Eric Schlosser’s article, Kid Kustomers, he demonstrates how child advertising has boomed by the tactics marketers use to get children to want and demand certain companies’ products.

Every parent's biggest fear is losing their child, and Nationwide knows that. The well known car insurance company aired their annual super bowl commercial that left viewers feeling scared for their children. Nationwide uses a scare tactic to leave its viewers feeling as if they don’t have this car insurance their children will die.

The final and the strongest appeal in the advertisement is pathos, the appeal to emotions. Throughout the ad sick children are being shown and getting treated by a doctor or nurse. Showing the family and children laying down on beds who are being diagnosed for cancer. By showing these images the audience feels a sense of loss, fear, pain and grief, even though they do not personally know the children. Also, by not helping these children the audience might feel

The United States require every driver to have car insurance in order to drive legally in the United States. The problem, however, is choosing the right one. Two of the major companies today are Allstate and State Farm. In the Allstate commercial, a man portrays “Mayhem” to show drivers the risks they experience while driving on the road. The man says he is modeling a blind spot, explaining that drivers may not see what hides in them, resulting in an accident. In the State Farm commercial, two situations are on display, one of which a teenage girl getting her first car, and the other a grown man getting his car broken into, demonstrating that State Farm is there for everyone. To endorse their product effectively, both of these brands apply pathos, ethos, and logos to their commercials.

Commercials through television and radio aimed towards children are ethical because it helps build healthy ideals. Through commercials, children can see that doing certain things are good for you! They can see that it is what they should do. “Advertising and marketing techniques could encourage children to eat

Nationwide’s advertisement narrowly succeeds to persuade its audience into supporting their “makesafehappen” movement due of their controversial yet emotional tactics of telling the audience the activities the young boy will never be able to enjoy due to his untimely death. The creator then goes on to give the viewer a few examples of preventable accidents within the home to reveal the dangers within their own walls to persuade the creation of a safer home for the youth. The audience is then shown varies non-descriptive and random scenes of a fallen and easy accessible box of detergent packs and a shattered television screen on the ground, both caused by an unidentified force, ultimately causing the slight failure of ethos in this

In a 65-year span, an average American spends around nine years watching television including 975 days of watching just commercials that is two million ads altogether. Parent are wondering what most of those commercials are regarding too? They are mostly businesses that are targeting kids to eat fast food or influence their parents to buy a product like a toy. Parents think that they can just turn off the T.V.? Yes, folks are correct they can shut down the T.V., but there are way more advertisements than just commercials so many that it is hard for even ad savvy parents to keep it away from their children. Marketers will try anything to get the kid to buy their products, or they will put a logo on everything that they can. How do they target

Every parent's biggest fear is losing their child, and Nationwide knows that. The popular car insurance company aired their annual super bowl commercial that left viewers feeling as if they had lost a child as well. Nationwide puts in place a scare tactic to leave its viewers fearing that if they don’t purchase this car insurance their children will die too. Advertisers in general use manipulating tactics such as fear, to scare certain groups into buying their products.

The first ad I will talk about is the Nationwide ‘Baby’ ad. The ad starts off with a man washing his baby in his driveway the same way one would wash a car (Nationwide). The ad goes on to show car related situations with a baby like running into a fire hydrant, car repair shop, and in a grocery store parking lot. The ad shows how Nationwide will protect what’s precious to you by making it precious to them. Therefore, just like a baby is precious and people will do anything to protect their baby,

GEICO’s advertisement located in Men’s Health November 2016 issue targets car owners through the use of several tactics such as segmented targeting, hooking the audience, and appealing to the audience while prying for consumers to make the simple choice; to chose GEICO over their competitors. GEICO is the second largest and one of the fastest growing private auto-insuring companies in the United States (GEICO, 2016). The target audience is reached through the imagery of a stack of cookies to correlate the greed and desire received from the food into the experience provided by insuring your car through GEICO. Additionally, GEICO strives to target customers through attempting to cater to their needs with the intended end goal of persuading them to choose GEICO over the “other guy”.

Insurance plays an important role in our lives to provide financial protection when most necessary whether it be an accident, a catastrophic event, or even death. Most insurance owners are on the search to find the best company for their buck. Competing companies create advertisements to lure in these particular viewers. The two commercials being compared in this analysis are marketed by insurance companies with the purpose of increasing the number of members and improving sales. Both advertisers of each company have a common goal but use different methods in hopes of reaching the intended audience, which can either make or break the advertisement. The “Allstate: Good Life” commercial failed to address the importance of having insurance whereas

The overall success of the proposed commercial would be an increased booster seat utilization, in Texas, which can be evaluated by observing the sales of the both booster and car seats in addition to reevaluating both the mortality from car accidents among children and the prevalence of serious injury. Determining that there was an increase in sales of child safety seats is correlated with an increase of availability the equipment. In addition, the commercial should be implemented in a single county and be compared to another neighboring county with a similar demographic, in terms of population, cultures, and laws, to determine the immediate efficacy of the commercial. Upon determining that the commercial is effective, the range of the broadcast can be expanded to a wider range. This would help to reduce the confounding variables. Specifically, a survey can be conducted about parental attitudes after one year of continuous airing commercial.

The commercial starts where we see a little boy trying to ride a bike while other boys ride off while he’s yelling “wait, hey wait.” Then it is the boy sitting on a bus and gets kissed on the cheek by a girl, and he says “Or get cooties.” As he wipes what is supposed to be the cooties off. We then see an airplane go by as the boy says, “I’ll never learn to fly.” We then see a bathtub in the ocean, as the boy and the dog are sailing. The boy says “Or travel the world with my best friend.” We then see the boy in a tux with his dog behind him, and surrounded by some toys. The boy says, “I’ll never get married.” Then we see the boy in front of a house as he’s telling us “ I couldn’t grow up, because I died in an accident.” We then are taken to a bathtub that I flowing over with water as the words, “ The number one cause of childhood deaths is preventable accidents.” We then see a sink with the bottom doors open and some dishwashing pods spilled open and on the floor, as the narrator says,

The Super bowl is one of the biggest games of the entire football season in the United States. This is where companies battle to gain a spot during the half time special and tend spend the most money when it comes to advertising. These ads can cost up to 5 million dollars and are usually highly creative, funny, created to catch the watchers attention with the hopes of going viral and selling their product. What the viewers do not understand is that these companies are selling much more than a product, they are selling a feeling and/or a lifestyle. Nationwide, the popular insurance company happened to be no different when creating their most polarizing and heart wrenching commercial. With the commercial most popularly known as “boy” their main goal was to start a conversation about preventable childhood deaths in America but, in reality they were selling fear and death in order to get parents to purchase insurance.

According to Fear Patterns: A New Approach to Designing Road Safety Advertisements, “Fear appeals can evoke the emotion of fear, and also perhaps the emotions of shock or disgust in the viewing audience with the aim of grabbing the audience’s attention and motivating them to act in a recommended way to avert the threat posed in the advertisement.” (266). In other words what this states, is at times the use of shocking the audience can go too far. This can result in the audience straying away from this ad, leaving it to be uneffective. In the commercial “Never”, the outwardness of a car accident and death in the first five seconds, takes away from the rest of the commercial, which is the most important part. The video starts out with a couple in a car smiling and looking at each other looking seemingly “more than happy.” Right from the start, a moment of intensity occurs. As the couple is driving down the road, they go smashing into the back of a truck. This moment of intensity