Your mom is gonna hate it

The other day, I wrote about how Axe with its sexiest ads attracts its target audience in a very direct way, and most of its consumers become “fans” of the brand and embrace it, while the ad also alienates a lot of consumers that find the ads of bad taste and even disrespectful.

While writing that post I kept remembering a Sony Playstation commercial, since the ad really impacted me, I surf the web to find it, the game is “Dead Space 2,” is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed by Visceral Games and published by Electronics Arts for PlayStation, Xbox and Microsoft Windows. Although, I link the ad only with Playstation because it ends with a signature id from only this company, probably a good topic for my next blog.

But why the advertising campaign stands out? With the idea that mom’s disapproval as always been an accurate parameter of what is cool, over 200 middle-age conservative women were selected for a “focus group study,” during the focus group the women were exposed to the violent video game scenes, and their reactions, emotions and opinions were video recorded, as you can expect their reactions were from nervous and stressful to almost crying, some were disgusted, shocked, other couldn’t believe what they have seen, and every single mom hated it. 

Here the behind-the-scenes.

During the ad several reactions of the women are showed, while the voice-in-of states how violent the game is and the reasons why you will love it. The ad ends with “your mom is gonna hate it.” They even have a web page YourMomHatesThis.com where you can see the actual focus group of several “moms” each reacting in a very negatively way without editing. 

Here the ad.

The game is M rated and only 17+ can purchase it, and I’m sure its target audience goes above and below that age, I’m sure that most of them will like it and found it interesting, as oppose to their moms. I’m not sure if the sales of the game will increase with this specific advertising campaign, but I’m sure most people out of the target will find it interesting and will try to find more about it, in this sense the game is attracting to new potential consumers and leverages on a great insight that whatever mom approves is not for you.