Mother’s Day Skittles AD: an Analysis

The Mother’s Day Commercial

Advertisements play a necessary part of these sales process for company to introduce a new product, and persuade more customers to spend on their goods, in order for the company to earn more profit. However, it is a challenge to think of an idea that attracts more customers’ attention since every corporation is trying to reach this goal. Sometimes, advertisements could affect consumer’s behavior negatively because when a commercial is too attractive, customers will spend more on an impulse purchase, which wastes their money on useless product. Surprisingly, a new released advertisement from skittles’ company doesn’t introduce a new product or a brand-new flavor, but they shoot a new commercial for celebrating the upcoming mother’s day on May 14.

The skittles’ thirty second commercial starts with a close view of an old woman’s hand, which is pouring out a pocket of numerous colors of skittles to her hand. Suddenly, the scene backs up to show her upper body. The old woman looks straight at the camera with her glassy eyes, shivering a bit to throw skittles into her mouth. “Lemon,” a deep voice comes from the woman’s side. “Uh-huh,” the women replies. When the scene goes to the man’s face, he looks comfortable sitting besides the woman, It is obvious to see that he is the woman’s son. While the old woman is throwing another skittles into her mouth, the man says the flavor out loud, “Orange,” “Uh-huh,” the woman replies again. Frighteningly, when the setting zooms out to both of the characters’ bodies, their intestines are exposed, lying on their legs. The woman keeps eating the skittles continuously until the man says: “I love eating skittles every time you eat skittles.” As he turns, he continues to smile at the woman, who replies: “ I love you eating skittles every time I eat skittles.” They look at each other peacefully and laugh. By the time the man turn his face forward, he breaths a sigh of relief and says: “I miss dad.” Then, the scene goes to an enlarged skittles’ picture with a rainbow background, showing the slogan at the bottom: “Cut the rainbow, taste the rainbow.” Finally, the scene goes back to the living room, where the man and the woman quietly sit on the sofa with a dog in between. The woman says joyfully: “Happy Mother’s day!”

After watching this commercial, it apparently showed that the skittles’ company didn’t give a direct message to persuade audience to consume the product; instead, they tried to make a connection with all the customers by releasing a new commercial for the upcoming mother’s day, a traditional celebration, to indirectly affect consumers buying habits and preferences. Since this commercial isn’t advertising a new product from skittles, the company is announcing that they were honoring mother’s day like everyone else does. This strategy is also known as pathos where the commercial showed a strong bond between a mother and a son to affect consumers’ emotion. By expressing their love to all of the mothers in the world, the customers will feel more satisfying with their product and be more willing to purchase their product when they see it in the store. People are also able to make assumptions about this commercial, such as delivering the skittle to the celebrations of mother’s day may boost their sweetness in the party, or they can even share this commercial with their friends or families in order to make fun of each other like the video did.

In the early scene of the commercial, there is only the elderly woman face with deep wrinkle lines on her forehead, looking straight at the audience with her glassy stare to make audience curious about what is going on with this woman. While they are catching attentions from customers’ curiosity, the shot moves to a man ‘s face. “Lemon,” the young man says. It was easy to catch that the man was talking about the flavor, but he also brings more confusion to the audience to think that was he talking about the flavor of what the woman just tasted; if yes, how did he know that? Surprisingly, when the scene zoomed out to both of the character’s bodies, it showed that their intestines are connected. This result looks straightforward to answer the audience’s question, but it also give them an impressive moment that the old lady had a linked intestine to her son. How could that have happened? On the other hand, even though the scene looks unreasonable when a real intestine was shown outside and connected to two human bodies, it is literally logical because a baby is born with a connected umbilical cord with his or her mother. The Skittles wasn’t just simply come up with the idea of a united intestine for two human to share a taste, but they actually use the nature rules to demonstrate the close relationship between children and their mothers.

Moreover, there was an easily neglected scene in the commercial is where the catchy slogan is shown: “Cut the rainbow, taste the rainbow.” The sentence did not make sense at the first sight, but if the viewers pause for a few minutes, the meaning was just as simple as “to try those colorful skittles.” The purpose of using metaphor of “cut the rainbow”, which referred to the multi colored skittles, was to convince consumers that eating skittles is the same as tasting the rainbow. The imagination aroused by this message could also catch audience’s interest to go for this product.

There is no doubt that the new skittles’ commercial successfully accessed to customers’ memory, where an association would show up every time when consumers see skittles in the market, and the chain reaction may affect their purchase decision.The most important factor that made the commercial unforgettable is that the advertisement used a real intestine, which is exposed outside the mother’s and the son’s body, connecting both of their navel, which directly showed that they were sharing the taste.

In fact, since this commercial is to advertise candies, which is a snack that would go through human mouth, throat, and stomach, hitting all of human sensation, it may not be appropriate to show a intestine for this kind of product. Therefore, this advertisement didn’t seem effective to sell their product because the umbilical cord doesn’t look appetizing to raise audience’s interest. However, a fantastic job that they did is to elevate consumer’s interest to the skittles company. Once a person feel enthusiastic about a group or a corporation, he or she will also care about the product that they produce since the impression is half the battle to enlarge the number of faithful consumers.

In order to make this advertisement more effective, it may be better to use a mother and a baby, which looks more reasonable to have a connected umbilical cord. Since babies cannot talk, they could be the ones who eat candies, letting mothers to speak out what flavor they eat, so the scene wouldn’t looks so creepy for customers. However, if the company chose the adult and the old women to perform this commercial on purpose, they may have actually tried to avoid the traditional thinking of motherhood, which can also count as a feasible strategy to catch audience’s awareness.