The BC SPCA Commercial Effectiveness

On average, individuals watch sixteen thousand commercials in a single year. One two-minute commercial that catches many viewers attention is the British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals commercial starring Sarah McLachlan, a world-renowned musician, singer, and songwriter. I am writing about this BC SPCA commercial to show you the different strategies they use to reach their audience, if they effectively reached their audience, and who their audience is. I believe they do reach their audience because the commercial has raised roughly thirty million dollars for the organization since the advertisements started running in early 2007. Which made it the SPCA’s most successful fund-raising effort. Many of the approximately two hundred thousand new donors attracted to the organization through the advertisement have pledged an average of twenty-one dollars a month to the SPCA.

This incline in the BC SPCA’s donations and adoptions is what makes me believe that Sarah McLachlan and the images and video clips of the abused, abandoned, and neglected animals helped make this commercial be affective and successfully reach their target audience. All commercials have different strategies to reaching their target audience. But first we need to know who their audience is. The BC SCPA is trying to target people who breed animals to provide a message to adopt animals from shelters and rescues instead. Six in ten Americans own some sort of pet, but only thirty percent of pets come from shelters or rescues.

The people who breed animals should instead adopt these animals in shelters and rescues because they will not always be available. Due to overpopulation, some shelters and rescues have to euthanize innocent animals because no one will take them home, they’d rather breed an animal and pay more money for it than rescuing one. Some strategies to reach their audience are to be simple yet creative, make it memorable, grab their attention, and make it relatable. The BC SPCA commercial grabs people’s attention right away. It starts by showing the animals that they have rescued while also playing Sarah McLachlan’s song “Angel.”