Nostalgic Commercials

Nostalgia is a useful advertising tool. To evoke a time period or event in the viewers mind and connect that feeling, not only to your product, but to an impulse to buy is a difficult thing to do. Nostalgia in advertising can be blunt and heavy handed, or subtle and deft. Both methods are relatively effective, given that your target audience remembers that time. Most ads using nostalgia aren't aimed at teenagers, instead they are targeting mid-aged people that have some life to reflect on. Here are a few examples of nostalgia used in advertising.

So God Made of Farmer for the Ram trucks is an interesting use of subtle nostalgia. It doesn't cite a time or a place but the motif it uses appeals to the "God-fearing-truck-driving-hard-working-farmer". The only problem is that not many farmers exist anymore, so what it actually does is sell cars to men who idolize hard work, and the others that this poem might speak to. The constant reference to Dad, Father, and how he is soft but hard, that is a nostalgic reference to people in the generation after the hard-worker, the sons and daughters of those farmers while still appealing to the hard-workers themselves.

A nostalgic commercial that we looked at in class was Axe's Susan Glenn ad which similarly to the Ram Truck ad uses a lone, deep voiced, serious narrator (seeing a trend here?) to describe a girl from his past. Axe chose ladies man, action hero, and all-around-bad-ass, Kiefer Sutherland, to narrate the ad. This ad's target audience is a little broader, although is mostly male. It uses nostalgia in the way that it harkens back to a similar experience that many men go through in highschool and offers the solution to that problem: Axe along with the tagline: fear no Susan Glenn.

Internet explore took a more direct, slap you over the head route with its browser you loved to hate campaign. There message was effective, it reminded you of things that were popular in the 90's which is always good for a quick laugh. But it also left you with an interesting message: 'We know we weren't the best browser ever, but that was then, we've grown up now.'