Proactiv Acne Treatment.
Where doesn’t this product advertise? Everyone has seen the infomercials with celebrities like P. Diddy and Jessica Simpson sharing their stories and how they couldn’t have gotten anywhere without this product. The company has enough money to be advertising ubiquitously, so they must be doing something right.
Proactiv is a 3-step treatment for acne, which may be one of the most common ailments that people have. Everyone has had a pimple at least once in their life, and nobody wants that kind of negative attention drawn to their face. Thus, this product is targeted at a vast target audience.
I think it’s safe to say that teenagers are the largest demographic to suffer from acne, so the campaign targets people ages 13 and up. If fitting in and avoiding being picked on isn’t the most important thing to adolescents, being like celebrities just might be.
The biggest advertising method used by this company is the “Famous-Person Testimonial”. They have used celebrities such as Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Jessica Simpson, Avril Lavigne, Julianne Hough, and Katy Perry, just to name a few.
In fact, the website dedicates an entire page to famous people paying tribute to the wonders Proactiv has done to their skin.
If that isn’t enough to convince someone with less than perfect skin to purchase this product, here is a perfect example of both the “Plain Folks Pitch” and reaching any possible demographic. On the website’s page entitled “Real Stories”, you simply enter an age group (13-18, 19-29, or 30-45+), a gender, and a skin tone to find plenty of testimonials from people “just like you”!
Like I said, infomercials on television probably amount for the biggest amount of advertising that is done. However, the other mediums used include the radio, magazines, billboards, the Internet, and others.
According to this article, Proactiv will be spending another $200 million on television advertising alone this year. Guthy-Renker, L.L.C., the corporate owner of Proactiv states that, “With so many options for consumers in our media-soaked culture, you need to create highly-targeted communications programs.”
As we can see, the company’s extensive advertising campaign is no coincidence. They know exactly what they are doing and it is what has made them so successful.
Since teenagers are the biggest demographic, you can find the most amount of commercials on channels like MTV around prime-time into the night. However, I would be hard pressed to find a channel that has never aired one of these ever so popular commercials:
