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.

Advertising is the cost of being boring?

Print: Hugh MacLeod (Gaping Void)

Hugh MacLeod created this poster for Andy Servonitz's recent Supergenius conference in New York. It's a popular point-of-view. Here's a variation on the theme from David Taylor: "Great brands are all about the product 'sausage.' And if that product is brilliant it advertises itself." In this view of the world, there's a a pecking order and advertising is being pecked.

The net benefit construct I talked about in my post last week is less judgmental. It says that brand value is determined by the difference in what people are willing to pay its benefits vs. what it costs a company to deliver them. How you get there? That depends on your analysis of what will work and what won't. This analysis, in these days of fragmented media and harder-to-persuade consumers, needs to account for the fact that advertising is not as efficient or reliable as it used to be. But I don't think it's helpful for marketers to go into such an analysis thinking that choosing advertising is a sign of failure.

Take Old Spice, for example. How should a business like that eke out some meaningful brand value? New product and packaging innovation can contribute but it's the Emmi-winning commercial "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" that's really moved the needle. You could argue that Old Spice is an exception and most ads are nowhere near as effective. I'd agree but also point out that there's a ton of wasted effort and cost in other areas of the marketing mix, especially in product innovation. Hey, it's not easy. All the more reason to have an open mind, I think.

Lost and Found: Advertising engagement

My kids couldn't be more delighted. What once was Lost is now Wipeout. Much bouncier and more fun, as far as they are concerned. But for those of us who survived six gripping, largely incomprehensible seasons, there's a little hole in our schedule, a little sadness in our hearts.

The Lost audience in the final season wasn't as big as it was at the beginning--some people did manage to get off the island. And it wasn't anywhere near as large as the typical audiences for American Idol. But the people watching the last few episodes did have one thing that many other shows don't have. And that was engagement. Not just with the show but with the ads too.

Nielsen reports that nearly 90% of the national advertisements aired during the final episode achieved higher brand recall compared to their average in other primetime programming. To be specific they, on average, generated 51% higher recall, 92% higher message recall and 66% higher likability. And customized ads that incorporated themes from the show did even better. This smoke monster ad from Target did the best of all:



As James Poniewozik points out in Time, that's why ABC was still able to charge a reported $900,000 a spot. He wonders if this fact suggests that it may be coming easier to monetize a smaller, but intensely interested, audience.

There are not many shows I would put in the same category as Lost in terms of engagement. My list is down to two at the moment: Breaking Bad and Mad Men. But for these few shows, I think advertisers can and should declare themselves as fellow fans and supporters. As the Nielsen numbers show, the audience will definitely give them credit for that.

Photo: lost by sebas on Flickr

Celebrity ad contradictions: Julia, Jeff and Jon

This is something I noticed while I was under the influence of watching Lost. This trio of ads all seemed to express celebrity contradictions of some kind or another. I'll leave it up to you to see if this post makes any more sense than Lost does.

1) Julia Louis-Dreyfus for Healthy Choice



Many/most celebrity endorsement ads fail because it's just not believable that the celebrity would use and enjoy the product. Remember pre-tree Tiger and his Buick spots? So, how to use a celebrity spokesperson like Julia Louis-Dreyfus to endorse Healthy Choice? The answer: Have her in the spots but don't have her endorse the product. That's unusual and a bit contradictory, right? I think that these ads, with great execution, get the balance between credibility and promotion just about right. It's a decided improvement over previous efforts. (The whole "Spokesperson" series can be seen here.)

2) Jon Hamm for Xfinity



Do you want a celebrity for themselves or for the character they portray? This is not Jon Hamm speaking here. It's Don Draper and, as we all know, he's a real pro.

3) Jeff Bridges for Hyundai



Finally, there's the case of Jeff Bridges who has been the voice-over for recent Hyundai ads but will be temporarily replaced by other actors for the seven spots planned to air during the Oscars. He's not done anything wrong. In fact, it's the opposite. He's nominated for best actor in for his role in "Crazy Heart" and the show has rules against ads that feature celebrities running near segments of the program that feature those same stars.

Brand Bowl 2010: A handy guide to watching the game

It's here again. Your chance to watch, rate and discuss the super and the not-so-super c.$3 million ads presented in a 3/4 hour show in between some boring football bits. (I wouldn't be saying that if the 49ers were playing, or even the Raiders, but both teams are still mired in failure.) Here's a handy guide to watching (either) game:

1) Brand Bowl 2010: As reported by Mashable, Brand Bowl 2010 is a: "New Super Bowl advertiser tracking site from Mullen and Radian 6 — offers near real-time analysis for an immediate look at pre-, post- and in-game Twitter reactions to the Super Bowl spots everyone will be watching." Pre-game buzz leaders are: Focus on Family, US Census Bureau and Paramount (for the eagerly-anticipated The Last Airbender spot).

2) Adweek Media Super Bowl XLIV: Top creatives will be chatting live during the Super Bowl giving their thumbs up or down as the ads are aired. In addition to this creative, critical chat, the site has news, blogs and commentary as well as Sneak Peeks of the ads themselves. As the ads are aired, AdWeek will start putting them up on the site. Meanwhile if you want to take another look at some of the best Super Bowl ads of the naughties, The Duffy Agency has put together its list.

3) YouTube adblitz: Commercials will also be uploaded as they air on this YouTube channel. Until then, there's pre-game coverage and party recipes.

4) Betting on the SuperBowl: An interesting perspective and analysis from The Keyhole. Its 8th Annual Super Bowl Engagement Survey is designed to: "Predictively measure viewers’ true reactions to brands within the context of the medium." The brands with the best fit, according to the survey, are: Coors, Hyundai, Diamond Foods (Pop Secret), Viacom's Iron Man II. Worst fit: Doctor Pepper Cherry.

If you insist on watching the football, here are some sites that may make that experience more enjoyable:

5) NFL XLIV Super Bowl site: Of course, you could always go to the official site and check out what's going on there. It has news, tweets, photos and you can watch the game online too. (#SB44 is the official Super Bowl tag for Twitter fans.)

6) 8 social media resources for Super Bowl: Mashable created its own list of social media resources. Its list includes: AOL’s FanHouse Super Bowl page is a great resource for Super Bowl news, as are the NFL pages from ESPN, Yahoo, Bleacher Report, Sports Illustrated, and CBS

Enjoy!

In the burger wars, Wendy's squares off

Video: You Know When It's Real. Wendy's

"Come on. Let's face it. You know it's real by how we make it. When it's real. You know when it's real."

There's absolutely no reason, when I think about it, that burgers should be round and that round burgers look more real than square ones. But I'm used to round burgers so, unfair as it is for Wendy's, I think square ones look artificial.

Which gets Wendy's off to a bad start when it tries to persuade me, with a side-by-side comparison, that its square burgers are more real than "the other guys" round burgers. It turns out that I, sample of one, don't measure reality by the way burgers are made. More by the way they look.

Putting aside my (hopefully for them) perverse reaction to the hamburger shape, what is the prognosis for Wendy’s new positioning? As pointed out in a recent story in The Wall Street Journal, Wendy's has struggled to define itself since the death in 2002 of Dave Thomas, its founder and former pitchman. Is focusing on freshness and quality and "poking fun at the competition" going to help them revive the brand?

I'm doubtful. Would asking Melinda Lou to pitch be a better bet? What do you think?

Wassup with that?

This election campaign ad must be driving the people at Budweiser crazy. It's a parody of Budweiser's "Wassup" ad with a very different and partisan message and it already has over 2 million views on YouTube. It shows that our Wassup friends have not not done so well in the Bush years and ends with a call to vote for change and Obama.

Burt Helm did some digging (details here) and found out that this new ad was made by the original director Charles Stone III and includes most of the original cast. That's why it looks so good. But how could that happen? Surely, Budweiser has the rights? According to Stone, the answer is "no." They never owned the idea and they just leased the rights (for $37,000). As he says: "That I’m able to use an idea distributed by a huge company, who made a lot of money off it, so that now when I put out what I want to say, it’s recognizable, and it sparks -- that’s worth $1 million to me."

From the Budweiser perspective, this is pretty much a disaster from a brand association perspective. The only good news is that there's a "does not reflect the opinions of Anheuser-Busch" disclaimer at the end of the ad which they'll have to hope works as intended. A little more generous allocation of funds to the rights ownership bucket might be in order in the future.

(Here's the original Wassup ad in case you want to see it.)

Dove calls its competition scum

It's not often that you can talk about your competition as "scum" and get away with it. Even political candidates, nasty as they sometimes get, avoid such language. But Dove is in the happy position to be able to use "scum" in the technical sense and cast all its rivals in this light. Dove's new campaign, as seen on Yahoo! says: "Soap leaves soap scum. Dove doesn't. See the difference for yourself."

A while back, I wrote a post on the issue of whether Dove had moved too far away from its product roots with its second and third generation of "Campaign for Real Beauty" advertising. My question now is: Has this round of advertising swung the pendulum too far back the other way?

If you click on the link to the ad on Yahoo!, you arrive at this landing page which includes an "artistic dramatization of soap scum in hard water." There is an attempt to link the two campaigns with a link called: "Real women react to soap scum" but, honestly, this campaign feels to me like a jarring disconnect. Or am I wrong?

Schlitz is back but not like this

I posted last week about the return of Schlitz. I doubt that Schlitz with Sunshine Vitamin D "to help retain the peak of sunny summer health—to help maintain rugged resistance to winter colds and sickness" will be one of the products in the new portfolio. Lime, clamata or pepper though can't be discounted.

Keep Sunny Summer Health - Drink Schlitz All Winter (Dec, 1936) : Photo courtesy of Modern Mechanix; permission being requested.

BMW connects with Mad Men

The barren summer of re-runs and reality TV is nearing an end and a new season of Mad Men, one of last year's biggest hits, is already up-and-running.

And how great it was to see how BMW took advantage of its exclusive sponsorship of Mad Men by tailoring an ad for the program. It featured Martin Puris, of Ammirati & Puris, talking about how he came up with BMW's famous tag line: "The ultimate driving machine." It was brilliant, successfully connecting with the show as well as reinforcing BMW's car performance heritage.

I can't think of any ads, outside of sports, that have even tried to connect with the program content. When done as well as this, it adds a whole level of goodwill over and above what even a great commercial can deliver (especially, in this case, because BMW only aired the one ad the whole program.)

Links:
1) BMW + Mad Men = Tailored Commercial = Great: Imagination.
2) Mad Men: Adhocracy

Burger King ad deja vu all over again

Inspired by Spiderman 3 last year, Batman this. Same burger, same ad.





As "Brainy Jello" comments on Dave Barry's blog, here's hoping that Silence of the Lambs doesn't inspire them next.

Links:
1) AND THE SO-CALLED 'UNITED NATIONS' DOES NOTHING: Dave Barry
2) Burger King uses Spider-man ad for Dark Knight burger: Den of Geek

Diamonds just taste better

Sometimes, brilliance is staring you in the face. You just can't see it until you turn your head to one side.

This report from Maclean's discusses the launch of "Diamond Shreddies," an unusual line extension has helped re-energize this 67 year old, originally square, Canadian cereal brand.

Key quote: "One perplexed man wrote the Edmonton Journal: 'I am not usually the suspicious type, but don't the new Diamond Shreddies look like the original Shreddies just flipped on their side?'"

And here's some of the focus group research:



Congratulations to Ogilvy and Mather who were awarded the 2008 Grand Clio for "best integrated campaign" for this "diamond Shreddie" concept and the client, Kraft for being brave enough to trust that consumers would get the joke.

Links:
1) Diamond Shreddies website
2) Diamonds are a brand's best friend: Macleans.ca

These last two blogs courtesy of Chris, the intern. Get back to work!!

Best Superbowl ad and University of Phoenix Stadium

It may seem a little perverse, with all the excitement of the game and all the creative juices used up on the ads (largely wastefully, in my opinion), that the one thing I focus on is the name of the stadium. But I just thought it was ironic that a university with no athetics program gets to name a professional sports stadium.

My favorite ad: Coca Cola's balloon spot - so far the best I can't believe I seem to be the only one saying so!
Most of the rest: Trying too hard

Most unfortunate ad placement I've seen for a long time

An ad for Sonic (America's Drive-In), first up in a commercial break in a showing of the World's Heaviest Man, a TLC program about an absolutely obese man in Mexico who's in the middle of deciding between surgery and the Zone diet. The juxtaposition of this man's plight and Happy Hour for Sonic's famous slushes was enough to put me off fast food for, I don't know, but at least a week. Bad for Sonic, good for resolutions.

U.S. advertising icons

Advertising Age has produced a web version of its 1999 "Advertising Century" report that includes lists of the top 100 campaigns and this list of the top 10 advertising icons.

1. The Marlboro Man - Marlboro cigarettes
2. Ronald McDonald - McDonald's restaurants
3. The Green Giant - Green Giant vegetables
4. Betty Crocker - Betty Crocker food products
5. The Energizer Bunny - Eveready Energizer batteries
6. The Pillsbury Doughboy - Assorted Pillsbury foods
7. Aunt Jemima - Aunt Jemima pancake mixes and syrup
8. The Michelin Man - Michelin tires
9. Tony the Tiger - Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes
10. Elsie - Borden dairy products

Out of this list, only Tony the Tiger and The Michelin Man were also icons in the UK, at least when I was growing up. Many of the others are for brands that are still U.S-only.

Gorilla campaign

Every once in a while ads get launched that transcend all accepted rules and conventions. This is one of those.

For those of you who don't know Cadbury's - it's the British Hershey's (although there could be an endless debate about which tastes better). Their advertising up to this point has been very traditional and functional - mainly about milk. Certainly nothing like this ad which has proved so popular that it has spawned a Facebook group and was viewed 500,000 times on YouTube the week after it was released.

I'm in two minds about the ad. I think it's great but I also think it's exceptional. If I was still in brand management I'd be worried that it will spawn a deluge of me-toos that will fall far short of this one.