That Jingle

Taylor Rayne Gardner

Tess Evans

September 12, 2011

Journal 1: Chapter 1

The snack that smiles back-Goldfish. Have a happy period-Always. Allstate-are you in good hands? Are we, though? Throughout our everyday lives we face hundreds of advertisements designed to get into our heads-and stay there. I can’t say that I am an avid television watcher any more, I used to have my “shows” and a guilty pleasure that I would flick on every now and again, but being in college I don’t get around to the boob tube much. When I did, I would find myself humming, or belting out obnoxiously at my little brother, depending on what seemed appropriate, the jingles of the commercials that flitted on. Well, now that I am in college, and am getting educated in that sort of thing, I guess I know why I knew the words to every one of those childish jingles, and the dialog between all of the strange characters placed in the commercials.

They wanted me too. Not to say that all of the advertising companies in the world new that a little brunette girl, with blue eyes and Korean heritage would be watching, but rather, that a adolescent interested in whatever show was on, would be. Bones, for instance, a drama that gets down in the dirt but focuses in on the interpersonal relationships between the characters, and all of the crazy that follows. The majority of the people I know who watch this show are women, probably due to the fact that they get to see David Boreanaz play a hero without fangs (he played Angel on Buffy, for all of you nongeeks out there.) Now, I don’t say that this is a totally female show, but I always see a few more tampon commercials during Bones, than when I flick over to the Basketball game and get a Just do it campaign.

What a lot of the general public overlooks, is that all of these companies that we are so love, the stores that we have to visit once a week, all have research teams dedicated to making ads that capture a target audience’s (that’s you) attention. They decide what ethnicity most people will relate to best, with women, they go for a generally racially ambiguous girl; they decide what color backdrops setting will be most appealing to you when showing you that car racing through a desert; and they somehow always manage to get the volume of your television louder so you can here it from the kitchen and sing along when you walk out to get a soda during the break.