Over the Weekend - In the Suburbs

https://archive.org/details/IntheSub1957

I watched "In the Suburbs" a 1957 sales promotion video recognizing the young adults living in the suburbs as special consumers. The magazine Redbook, displayed this sales commercial in hopes of reaching their targeted audience of the young adults who were titled, suburbanites. This 20 minute film was especially interesting because it described a new generation. These husbands and wives moving away from the cities to start their own families in the suburbs introduced a whole new idea. Their generation befuddled advertisers because of this new experience and forced marketing campaigns and advertising messages to shift according to their life adjustments. This video greatly emphasized that it was a community of young adults who all share the same life decisions and issues. The commercial displayed how the magazine itself focuses on these life situations that the suburbanites go through. For example, doing daily chores, doing laundry, cooking meals, raising your first child, buying a new home, taking out loans, and everything else introduced when starting your own family was emphasized by Redbook. They studied these young adults to build a strong and personal relationship so that they could directly target their needs and life changes.

This video is very prevalent today because like these young adults, a new generation of starting their own life in the suburbs, they changed marketing forever. I think this generation of suburbanites is directly relatable to our generation. This generation was the first to have social media at our expense, live out lives with accessible technology and have also changed the advertisers strategies. Our generation, like that of the 1950s and 1960s young adults, started a new trend that was at first seen as different but then became the norm. They changed the roles of starting a new family and moving to a community, as our generation has taken on social media and changed the role of communication between people.  This film reminds us that there will always be generations that change the world. There will always be a groundbreaking new technology or fad or introduction of a new invention that will alter our lives, society and especially how advertisers and marketers can reach this new generation.