Thursday, February 3, 2011

Gamefly

Part of rhetoric is using purposeful language or images to capture the attention of a "target" audience. In the case of Gamefly, a site that delivers games for people to try out before actually buying the games, they know their audience pretty well.

My favorite commercial by them is this one:

Anyone who has played a terrible game knows how frustrating it is to have bought that terrible game. You go to the store, excited at the possibility of playing this wonderful game that had such wonderful reviews; you buy it for approximately somewhere between the price of $40.00 and $60.00; you take it home, open it, put it in the gaming system, start playing it. Five minutes, maybe even two hours into it, you realize this game is absolutely awful.

Obviously the commercial is an exaggeration, but that feeling a gamer gets when a game is terrible is pretty close; it's pretty dissapointing, frustrating, and it really does make you want to throw a temper tantrum as if you've regressed back to the age of three. It makes you want to throw that game out the window and stomp around the house.

Gamefly knows that about bad games. They know that gamers are serious when it comes to games, especially good ones. They know their audience and create commercials that specifically target that feeling. A good game can make the players sit at home for hours, skip meals, not answer phone calls/text messages (we can thank Call of Duty for that a lot of times), and it can make some grown men even call out of work.

We live in a commercialized world; almost everything is targettig an audience and if the producers know this audience well enough,  their product will sell.

6 comments:

  1. Oh My God, bahahah. That's on the of the funniest commercials I have EVER seen. I had to watch it twice. My mom ordered things online for christmas one year from game stop and they sent the cases....but there were no games inside. I'm glad these guys could target the right audience without being crude and sexual about it like most advertising companies go for.

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  2. This is great! I mean, we really do live in a commercialized world, and advertisers and marketers really have mastered the art of their "study," for a lack of better terms. I'm not a big gamer, but this is a great example of just that!

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  3. I really like this post! It hits near and dear to my heart. My boyfriend always has me buy him games for birthdays, Christmases etc., and so I spend an excessive amount of money on it and he decides he doesn't like it. The worst. I really loved the commercial and how legitimate it is, but also how it's just funny and not crude.

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  4. I love this post! Its not crude of sexual like one might think. Advertisers today really know what they are doing, or at least these ones have make this add. I think we have all had those moment where ya buy the game and hate it so thanks for showing us this commercial.

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  5. I like that you're zoning in on advertisements, Ali. Keep this in mind as we're approaching our next assignments!

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  6. I must add... I think I liked the person pulling books off of the shelf the best.

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