Sprite's Use of Advertising in Securing Consumers
Sprite's Use of Advertising in Securing Consumers
Advertisements of today are frivolous at best, downright ridiculous at worst. Buy this cream and never age. Wear these jeans and attract beautiful men. Get perfect abs with no effort at all. Today’s market-savvy consumer will not buy into the fraudulent television commercials of yesterday. Ads that center on a product’s powers to transform a person into someone more hip, sexy, and fashionable, have become easily recognizable as ludicrous and false, and have thus lost their effectiveness. In the last few years, however, a new breed of commercial advertising has sprung up: the anti-ad. The Sprite soft drink corporation’s “Image is nothing” ads are a good example of how these ads, though nothing more than television commercials themselves, mock the entire institution of advertising in a ploy to attract ad-weary consumers.
Anti-advertising shines a new light on marketing, playing on consumer skepticism while putting a new spin on an old selling technique. The idea is to spoof propaganda, telling the audience that they, the producers of this ad and makers of this product, would never try to con consumers by using dishonest marketing tactics. In all honesty, however, the success of the ad depends entirely on just such a ploy. The Sprite Corporation has repeatedly made connections with anything hip and trendy, using basketball and hip-hop as central themes and Grant Hill as a spokesperson, obviously in hopes of having these adjectives associated with their product in the eye of their public. Sprite has often tried to set itself up as the product that discourages this kind of scheme. Their “Image is nothing” campaign works on the principle that physical attributes like beauty, youth, and sex appeal cannot be transferred or exchanged to people by means of a product.
The Sprite ads tell viewers that soda will not improve their looks or give them basketball skills. One such ad shows tough looking, urban athletes using power and force to promote Sprite. The humor comes when the director yells, “Cut,” and the “rough-neck kids from the streets” turn out to be whining thespians, complaining about motivation and trailer space. Another ad shows a young kid drinking Sprite and attempting to dunk a basketball, only to be brutally rejected by the front of the rim. These and other similar ads commend the audience for recognizing that products, particularly soft drinks, do not make them cool or more...