The Long Lost Assignment
On Mondays and Thursdays (when I am home for at a normal dinner time) I generally watch Gilmore Girls on ABC Family from 5-6pm while I make my dinner. I don’t really ever watch the commercials during the show because I use the commercials to cook my dinner, and talk to my other housemates that are in the kitchen making dinner as well. The other day, however, I decided to sit through an entire commercial break and really look at what they were showing.
I expected certain commercials to be on, being on ABC Family during Gilmore Girls. The average person watching this show is probably a young girl - maybe ages anywhere from 12-22. Based on this audience, I found some interesting things concerning what commercials were shown.
Some of the commercials made sense that they would be shown. For example, a preview for the new movie that’s coming out with Raven, a Stride Gum commercial, a Harry Potter movie marathon preview, a Snickers commercial etc.
However, some of the commercials really didn’t make any sense for the target audience. For example, there was one for “Alert USA” which is an assistance system for older people (the sort of thing where if you are in trouble there’s a button you can press that is easily accessible where someone can come and help you). It doesn’t seem appropriate that Alert USA would want their commercial to be seen by young girls, because they are not nearly old enough to use it themselves, and are not even old enough where they would have a parent who needed it.
Going in the other direction, there was a commercial for “Garanimals,” which is a children’s clothing line for very young kids. The little boys on the commercial were probably about 6 years old. It is a line of clothes for infants to children about the age of 8. The people watching Gilmore Girls are not the target for either wearing or buying these clothes. Again, the choice seems inappropriate.
A last example is that they showed a State Farm Insurance commercial. Again unsuitable for the majority of the audience watching, because few are old enough where they make insurance decisions on their own. I am 22 years old, and I haven’t started paying my own car insurance yet. Out of my friends that do pay their own insurance, most of them just use whatever insurance agency their parents use. Few girls ages 12-22 really care about insurance commercials; they probably aren’t even really watching it.
Watching the commercial break made me wonder why some of the commercials were shown on the station and during the time that they were. It was an interesting experiment.
