Sunday, February 3, 2008

The Gorilla and Cadbury Chocolates

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo

This ad has always interested me. It is so incredibly bizarre, every time I watch it I just ask myself how does it sell chocolate? After some analyst, I came up with a couple of ideas. Cadbury is a very old style chocolate company. With the current generation, Cadbury is not nearly as recognizable as, say, Hershey chocolates. So how does Cadbury try to appeal to a younger audience? They put a drummer in a gorilla suit and let him wail on the drums. This appears to young people in two ways. First, kids and young adults see drums as a bad ass instrument. The second reason the ad appeals to a younger generation is through the gorilla suit itself. When you think about culture and television today, you realize a lot of people watch and enjoy shows like Jackass and Viva La Bam. To pull off a lot of pranks, for some reason, a lot of the actors resort to using a gorilla suit. In fact, in the Jackass pilot a man in a gorilla suit chases around another man in a banana suit.

Cadbury’s ad does make an attempt to reach the younger generations, however, they do not outcast their older customers. The song the gorilla drums to is, “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. Most people in the present generation know absolutely nothing about this song. Nevertheless, the song is able to connect with older generations since the song was a big hit in the mid 1980s to early 1990s. Therefore, Cadbury is able to speak to a wider demographic.

1 comment:

Roger Market said...

I'd be careful saying that "most people" today don't know that song, unless you've done a poll. I'm just saying...be careful of absolutes when you are writing. Anyway, I love the commercial; it's very interesting. In all, this is a pretty good assessment of it (I wasn't sure how it worked either, but you've got some good ideas about it).