Ripped from Women's Magazines: Smart niche advertising

Forgive the crinkling. These ads literally came from my bedside table where one of them may have served briefly as a coaster.

AIG's 'How to pick a puppy that's right for you'
Challenge: Couples are waiting longer to have children and a still-small but economically-influential niche is choosing not to have them at all. For this audience, the typical guilt and responsibility ploys that have delivered in retirement and financial planning for the last several decades may be a little less potent.

Strategy: Find a niche and talk to it. Pet parents, maybe? Yeah, why not. Hugely passionate group of humans who are as happy to invest time and attention to advice as a nervous new real mom.

Result: Bare minimum?  Pet parents spent some time with this brand. AIG stopped the page flip and may have given them something to talk about at work the next day.

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Citi 'Dividends are a girl's best friend'

Challenge: Being impactful in their own media buy. Finding eyes for a message about the serious work of being a successful grown-up in the most escapist medium of them all -> women's magazines. Great recipes, cool clothes, fun room makeovers,  workouts I'll never do ... that makes me think about a bubble bath, not my theoretical portfolio.

Strategy: First, borrow equity from the medium - take the ad you'd expect (diamonds) and make it about the product we want to talk about. Second, play into the ambivalence a lot of women feel about even spending time reading this fuzzy stuff by delivering a message of empowerment in an unlikely source.

Result: Increasingly, women in their 20s and 30s are making more money than their partners. They're the responsibility and income hub of the household. Often, they are the household. I can't imagine this ad doesn't connect with them...

Great ads -

Comments

[Paul Simister]

I can certainly relate to the puppy advert but then I have an Italian spinone with attitude.

[jen_chan, writer SureFireWealth.com]

I love these ads! I liked how citi managed to convert something that is already considered a classic line. "Diamonds are a girl's best friend." And they're lucky that everything just fell into place. If it's not dividends, it might not have had the same effect. And the puppy ad is too cute! I find my heart just melting over the first few lines.