Humor, Nostalgia and Sex

The average consumer sees thousands (5,000) of advertisements everyday.  Making the job of the advertising professional, very difficult as they have to create a visual advertisement campaign that makes their product different and original from the rest so that it sticks in the mind of the consumer, as well as adequately separates their brand from the rest of the products that may populate their respective industry. Three factors of advertising that have proven time and time again to help sell a product is humor, nostalgia, and sex.

Sometimes a company has to take a risk in their quest to give themselves a clear identity.  This identity may involve moving away from highlighting the aspects of the product that sets them apart from the rest and instead focusing on the entertainment aspect of the advertisement that may not be informative, but it does draw the consumers attention. Some companies have been able to find that sweet spot between informative and entertainment a prime example would be the entertaining Dollar Shave Clubs ads that are able to sell you on a product without making the consumer feel as if they were being sold a product. That perfect combination of comedy and advertising a product that works very well, was the big "thing" in advertising that helped to ingrain a product and an ad into that moment in time. 

Every brand is looking for the next big "thing", the advertisement that becomes part of the culture of that point in time that defines a moment. A perfect example of this besides the Dollar Shave Club that relies on humor to draw in its audience, of course would be the memorable Budweiser ads.  That generally run around major events such as the Super Bowl or christmas time, that pulls on the heart strings of the viewers and relies on that feeling of nostalgia, so that the ad then becomes associated with the events that are occurring at the same time as the advertisement. This nostalgic feeling of time spent with family was utilized to perfection by Budweiser to get people to honestly feel a personal connection to beer, a pretty impressive feat. 

When it comes to using sex to sell a product no industry does it more than the perfume and cologne industry. Every single one of their advertisement has a scantily clad female or male simply walking around while some catchy song plays in the background. The hopes of these companies is that the consumer will stop and watch these advertisements simply because they notice the attractive people in the commercials or print ads. They rely heavily on the sex appeal of the adcvertisements so the consumer will remember the name of the products and try out the scent at a nearby store. Cologne and Perfume are a tricky product to sell since their are so many products available, many of which use very similar advertisement campaigns. This is the reason that the major players in the industry on top of using attractive people have tried to bring in famous faces to help draw attention to their products. 

Humor, Nostalgia, and Sex are three main keys to drawing the consumer toward your companies product. The reason being that they play a major role in controlling the consumers emotions. The majority of the time the consumer will never remember what is said in an advertisement, but they will remember how the ad made them feel.