They tried. They made a system that features an inoffensive, family friendly "tablet" type of controller, whose main sell is that it can be used to play games while boyfriends/girlfriends/brothers/sisters/moms/dads are watching television. They backed it with a ton of gender inclusive, family friendly advertising, supported by a bunch of DS/Wii casual style games. All of this happened before, during, and after launch.
It failed to catch on. No one cared, because they were too busy with their smartphones and iPads, with Flappy Bird, Minecraft, and Candy Crush Saga.
Trying isn't enough....you can't just win an audience over because you put up a half-assed effort to try and win their dollar; and that's the thing..."half-assed" sums up the core WiiU strategy pretty well.
The Tablet controller is humongous and has a bunch of buttons; it's stuck somewhere between the design philosophies behind the simplistic intuitive Wiimote and the complicated core focused Dualshock, this makes it really unappealing to both audiences because it's a "Jack of All Trades Master of None".
Nintendo Land suffers from the fact that none of it's ideas (despite their quality) are as appealing or as intuitive as just playing real world sports games in a simplistic and familiar way. Running around as little Samus Miis in a battle arena fighting against a gunship sounds like something that's supposed to appeal to young men...but unfortunately for Metroid Blast it's art direction is too cutesy and it's dynamics are too simplistic for that.
Nintendo Land is a lot like the core WiiU strategy, many of it's mini-games are trying their best too appeal to two different demographics but it fails because there a better more dedicated options on the market.
This is also very true of the WiiU's early software ecosystem...Nintendo was pushing the likes of Zombie U, Darksiders2, Batman, and Assasin's Creed pretty hard; hell, they were promoting them just about as much as they were promoting their youth/family/casual-aimed software like NSMBU and Nintendo Land. That kind of software mixing sends confusing messages to potential consumers, it causes them to ask "Who is the machine for, and why shouldn't I just go for software ecosystems that are completely dedicated to my needs?"
Blue ocean consumers want the best software ecosystem for youth/family/casual-centric software, and "Red Ocean" consumers want the best software ecosystem for young male-centric games; you can't really realistically have both in this day and age.
Furthermore, those commercials you pointed out are only superficially similar to the "Wii Would Like to Play!" (god that was genius) commercials.
Look at these
commercials (it's compilation, these commercials were often shown separately), they are so relatable and fun but they're also incredibly focused.
All of the youth/family/casual software features people who you really wouldn't expect to play AAA PS3/360 games (Little girls, young women, middle age women, middle age men, old women, old men, families etc.), and they all look like they're having a blast! Plus, the editing makes every action these people are performing super readable. It's easy to see these commercials and assume that someone was thinking "Whoa, that controller is letting them bowl like it's the real thing. I wanna try that myself!"
Also you'll notice that there are TWO major commercials dedicated to this group.
Look at the commercial with Zelda, Metroid, and Red Steel; it's pretty damn clear who those games are aimed at, young males. The editing and shots make every action look powerful and focused.
On the TV/video advertisement side of things the message was pretty clear.
The WiiU advertising campaign is the complete opposite of this...it's weird and abstract. There is loud overbearing mechanical music...a bunch of unrelated people in rave boxes...a giant video game controller that kind of sort of looks like a DS but not really...the editing is erratic, it's kind of hard to see what's going on...
It's a mess, a complete and utter unappealing mess.
Saying, something akin to "Nintendo tried, but the WiiU failed to catch on because casuals don't care about consoles" is simplistic and shortsighted, it completely ignores why the Wii was a success and why Nintendo's actions in 2011-2012 were so hurtful to their business.