Who’s Your Audience?

This spot has been getting a lot of play on the advertising blogs lately. It’s an Australian beer ad for VB, which is immensely watchable, even for non-Australians. I’m not a VB drinker and nor will I go out of my way to find it, but the spot created a really positive impression of the brand for me…and really that’s what matters. VB is a massive mainstream beer…effectively the Bud of Australia, with huge appeal to a broad audience. I can imagine the planner sitting down to try to write the “target audience” section of his brief and struggling to find anything really insightful for his creative team. Then, maybe the lightbulb went off that the insight was not about a focused target audience, but more about the brand’s huge everyman appeal. The fact that VB is enjoyed by a huge array of Aussies means that it must have something special about it. The way the spot celebrates this appeal across a range of stereotypes is a great creative leap. It reminds me of the brilliant Bud radio spots years ago celebrating Real American Heroes (all 110 of them here) .

More importantly, it reminds me that while we often strive to focus down to a tight definition of our audience, maybe we should look much more broadly at a larger pool of users and concentrate more on what they need, rather than just who they are.