You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …
The Product:
Spectrum Wi-Fi
The Promotion:
The Pitch:
When having a mere one hundred Wi-Fi devices isn’t enough.
Who is this ad for?
I can believe there are people who need a Wi-Fi router capable of handling up to 200 devices at once … but they’d be business owners, whose Wi-Fi is used by a whole bunch of employees and customers. That’s not what this ad seems to be going for, though.
This ad focuses on a private residence, where the non-Spectrum Wi-Fi just isn’t strong enough to handle all of the household devices. Things like toasters, doorbells, refrigerators, power outlets – stuff that absolutely must be connected to the Internet at all times in order to function. If it’s in anyway electrical, of course it’s gotta be on your Wi-Fi network – otherwise, we might as well be barbarians. So a router that can handle literally hundreds of devices: just something every home needs.
I just … I don’t see the market for that. Maybe there are people who are so gadget obsessed that this level of Wi-Fi would be necessary, but they must be such a small portion of the population, advertising to them with a big commercial like this can’t possibly be cost effective.
After pondering for a great long while, I’ve come to the conclusion that Spectrum is actually trying to sell this router to people who don’t need it. They know almost no one is going to need even just fifty Wi-Fi devices going at once, let alone two hundred. But that’s not the point. The point is that 200 is a big number, and if the Spectrum One router can handle that … why, that makes them the biggest, the strongest, the best.
And people want to have the best. Doesn’t matter whether second-best or third-best or fourth-best would be more than they could ever use – if there’s a theoretically better model available, they’ve gotta have it. There’s no reason you’d ever need or want your toaster to have its own Internet connection, but isn’t it nice to have the option?
