Friends Furever

Friends Furever

Marketing Management Unit 6 Written Assignment

By

Hector Gonzalez

Instructor Juwairyah Sabir

     Google through the independent advertising network Droga5 developed an ad for android called Friends Furever.  In this ad, pairs of different kind of animals are playing together and basically “getting along”.  They even include some wild animals and some domestic pets frolicking in land as well as in water.  The video was viewed more than 6.4 million times and became the most shared ad of all time.  

1. Would you consider this to be an emotional or rational ad? Why?

     Google through this ad I believe is making a statement of how individuality can thrive and everything can be adequate without it all having to be the same.  This is a subtle attack on Apple users and how they are used to everything being fine as long as all products are Apple products (Elmer-Dewitt, P., 2015).  So Google, with Android apps adapted for Apple’s iOS can be friends with Apple and not be the same.  There is rationality behind this ad as friendship is promoted.  Google makes four times more money from the ads in its apps through iOS users than Android’s.  This is because Apple’s users are for the most part better off and buy more things online.  Google in 2014 also paid Apple $1B to be the default search engine on its iPads and iPhones.  Google is making that up and more in iOS revenue (Petrovan, B., 2014).  

     In a market that is ever more fragmented in modern times with so many different varieties of a certain kind of product, Google through its search engine offers consumers some order to so much diversity.  They are in my opinion telling the consumer that there is a product or a solution tailored just for you no matter who you are.  Who is not going to identify with this message?

1. Who do you think is the target audience for the ad?

     Google I believe is directing this ad to the public and computing device users in general but more specifically to Apple users.  Apple had used Bing as its default search engine on Siri only to be replaced by Google’s.  Apple Mac users through the Safari browser already used Google’s search engine by default and so now Mac and iPhone as well as iPad users will get the more popular Google search results.  This translates to a lot of revenue for Google.  Apple users are very loyal to the brand and maybe unfriendly toward Google, Microsoft, and perhaps others with whom it competes directly against.  So in essence it is telling these users that Google is not so bad.  They can be friends yet not the same.

     In a more general sense, marketing managers have found that creativity rather than the type of media chosen is most effective.  To target who you want to target they say the message needs to be standardized, sturdy, and have advertisers report on the progress of the ad so companies who hire these agencies maintain a focus of who they want to target (Gibs, J., 2009).  

1. Why do you think it has gone “viral,” i.e., so many people have wanted to share it?

     This ad communicates a message of affection and comfort.   Social platforms like Facebook thrive with animals as the main feature.  Also, how does anyone access content these days if not through YouTube?  (Spin Creative, n.d.).  There is a familiar tune in advertising and it is that showing puppies and babies does work.  Technology companies and advertising agencies want to rise above the product and get to family and love (O’Brien, M. 2015).  By using animals in their video, Google establishes a feeling of warmth and wellbeing associated with its product and becomes part of the conversation with positive images.

    A couple of marketing researchers have discovered that flashing the brand, boring emotions, shocking emotions, and the wrong audience will bring about failure for an online ad.  So often these qualities contribute to the viewer liking the ad somewhat and yet not share it.  The solution they say is to show the brand a little, provide joy and surprise immediately along with an emotional rollercoaster, and target the right viewer who often has qualities of extroversion and egocentricity (Teixeira, T., 2012).