Entry #5: Analyzing Mayhem

     

     Advertising today comes in all shapes and sizes: a billboard on your way to work, a promoted tweet on your timeline, social media accounts for companies, deals advertised outside the store as you enter, the product placement your hardly noticed in the latest movie, 30-45 second clips in between your shows on tv or just 5-10 before a Youtube video. All of it serves a brand and how that brand is being represented has usually been meticulously considered. Creators of advertisements consider how their ads can fit in with and strengthen the brand of the companies seeking their service.

     They may ask themselves: who is the commodity for? Where is the audience? What is the purpose of the ad? How can an ad achieve that purpose for the intended audience? What is the most effective way to present the ad to achieve the intended result? If we examine advertisements carefully we can deconstruct some of these questions and pull out elements of rhetoric that they had likely considered.

Here is the advertisement that I'll be examining today:

     The ad opens with a pink SUV driving through the parking lot of a mall, an alert sound plays. The camera cuts inside to the driver's seat. A man with stubble and a suit is checking texts on his bedazzled cellphone. Aside from some oversize pink glasses he looks a bit worse for the wear, with a cut on his forehead and a bruise, as well as a butterfly bandage, by his eye.The man narrates what he's just read off his phone, informing the viewer that he is in fact "a teenage girl" who's "BFF Becky just kissed Johnny". This causes a problem for the narrator whom "likes Johnny."

     Of course, the narrator isn't really a teenage girl. In fact, many viewers of the ad may already know the character as "Mayhem", the character used in what was a running series of ads for Allstate Insurance. Mayhem is a stand-in for what could go wrong; he represents all of the random consequence that can come with your life. Mayhem does this by deliberately, perhaps delightfully, causing all sorts of destruction to your home and your car, then pointing out how your existing insurance, or lack of insurance, puts you at risk of shouldering all the burden. After causing his destruction, Mayhem closes by saying some variation of the phrase "so get Allstate, and you could save money and be better protected from mayhem, like me." This ad is no different.

     In this particular ad, Mayhem reacts poorly to the news that Becky kissed Johnny. Mayhem careens the SUV into the bumper of another car, saying he is "emotionally compromised". Still in character as a teenage girl, Mayhem fumes, "I'm like, 'OMG! Becky's not even that hot!'",seeming to not even care about or notice the damage done to the other vehicle. As Mayhem drives away, a woman runs out to her now badly damaged car carrying shopping bags, looking at her car with shock and dismay. Mayhem informs the viewer, "if you've got cut-rate insurance, you could end up paying for this yourself." 

    It's this woman who the viewer is supposed to relate to. However, that isn't to say the primary audience is women. While the issue of being at the mall and coming out with a purse and decorative shopping bags may be more common for women, the fear of coming to your parked car and seeing it damaged in a way it wasn't when you left it is something we all dread. The larger context of an audience that has seen multiple Mayhem ads is that this is just another potential problem. While the situation itself is often far-fetched and comedic, the results are something we all would like to avoid. 

    Using humor, the ad gets the audience to not only watch the ad, but remember it, share stories of it, maybe even develop a more fond opinion of the brand as a result of being entertained. But it also uses real consequence to motivate the viewer to buy insurance from Allstate. I think it's effective in this purpose, you can find every Mayhem ad on YouTube and even a few compilations. At the very least, it was definitely a popular ad campaign, at least by my estimation. At the time, I remember plenty of people talking about the latest ones. 

     I know I remember it from more than a few years ago, and that certainly isn't something I can say for any one of the who-knows-how-many ads we've all been exposed to in our lives.