SOTB Super Bowl 2011: Your guide to watching the ads, not the game

Super Bowl XLV: An iconic symbol for a world-class event (Landor)

Time to watch some ads. While two teams I dislike equally battle it out on the field; cars, beers, movies, sodas and GoDaddy will be competing for attention and praise. This year, some companies have decided to jump the gun and have released their ads ahead of time. I4U has a rundown of all the ads and links to the ones that have been pre-released. (It's also set up its Super Bowl for Geeks Guide to cover all the news about the ads.) A couple of the notable pre-releases:

1) VW The Force



2) HomeAway: Test Baby (This one may generate some heated commentary.)



This pre-release of some of the ads means that armchair judging can already begin:

3) Brand Bowl 2011: Mullen and Radian6 have teamed up again to give us a way of ranking all the commercials. In last year's bowl, Doritos beat out Google for the top spot. Doritos is back this year with another fan-made ad and will be hoping for a repeat.

4) The Super Bowl Ads You Can't Miss: Forbes
Forbes interviewed a panel of experts (CMOs, creative directors and marketing professors) for their top picks. Most anticipated include:  Snickers (featuring Roseanne Barr this year, not Betty White), Best Buy (the unlikely pairing of Justin Bieber and Ozzy Osbourne), GM which has a whole bunch of ads including one for the Volt and CareerBuilder.com which is bringing back its monkeys.

5) Top 5 Social Media Game Plans for Super Bowl Advertisers: Mashable
As Todd Wasserman points out, social media offers an opportunity to improve the ROI of an ad spot. He outlines five ways companies have been leveraging social media from the ultra basic approach of posting their ads on YouTube to the more ambitious approach adopted by Kia which has devised an online puzzle that can only be solved by finding clues buried in each of its ads.

6) Puppy Bowl VII: Animal Planet
Hate football, love puppies? The tune into Animal Planet's Puppy Bowl VII. Two hours of cute with kittens also performing in the Bissell Kitty Half Time show.

Meme of the Week: Kenneth Cole puts his shoe in his mouth

Oh, Kenneth! It must have seemed so drole and au courant in those few seconds it took to compose and send your tweet connecting the turmoil in Egypt with your new spring collection. Perhaps a few more seconds thought might have led to second thoughts.

But the cat was out of the bag and the Twittersphere was quick to judge and react. A short time later @KennethColePR was up and running, parodying the original tweet with some variations on the theme like:

"Locked in Charlie Sheen's closet? Tweet how many pairs of Coles he has!" and "People from New Orleans are flooding into Kenneth Cole stores!"

The apology eventually came but, by that time, people were having way too much fun to listen or care. Lessons: 1) Think before you tweet 2) Take ownership of  your PR suffix 3) What people think is funny depends on context. While people condemned the original tweet for its crass attempt to market against a revolution-in-progress, those same people were completely OK with really outrageous tweets from @KennethColePR under its protective parody shield. You have to have a sense of who you are and how far you have permission to go.

For more on this story, read here

Bad ideas to stimulate good ones: Monkeys making helicopters

Good Idea/Bad Idea by Fredo Alvarez (Flickr)

Mr. Skullhead is a character from the animated television series Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs. He would feature in a short segment called "Good Idea/Bad Idea." He would first perform a mundane task uneventfully and then be asked to perform a similar task with one crucial detail changed to make it a bad idea. (Good Idea: Having breakfast served to you in bed. Bad Idea: Having tennis balls served to you in bed.) Every time Mr Skullhead did the bad variation of the first activity he'd suffer one way or another.

But what if you reverse the flow? Turns out the entertainment industry uses this approach to stimulate creativity. As described by Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) in the Wall Street Journal:

I spent some time working in the television industry, and I learned a technique that writers use. It's called "the bad version." When you feel that a plot solution exists, but you can't yet imagine it, you describe instead a bad version that has no purpose other than stimulating the other writers to imagine a better version.

For example, if your character is stuck on an island, the bad version of his escape might involve monkeys crafting a helicopter out of palm fronds and coconuts. That story idea is obviously bad, but it might stimulate you to think in terms of other engineering solutions, or other monkey-related solutions. The first step in thinking of an idea that will work is to stop fixating on ideas that won't. The bad version of an idea moves your mind to a new vantage point.

He then proceeds to demonstrate how his own bad ideas (on his chosen subject of taxing the rich) really do help make you think of better ideas. I think it's a great technique and I'm going to try it the first chance I get. I'll report back if that turns out to be a bad idea.