The Super Bowl is a sports-themed entertainment event. Companies that advertise on the Super Bowl (at $4 million a minute, this year's going rate) are looking for something else. And so, most emphatically, are the agencies who design, produce and then sell their clients on the resultant output.
The corporate sponsors seem intent on creating a warm impression. And there is nothing wrong with that. It's generally a good thing. But that is separate and distinct from selling. They will usually employ humor and pathos to associate themselves with those human emotions and hope- perhaps trust - that we think well of them when we next see their stuff on a shelf or on a 'real' ad somewhere. They seek to enhance reputation more than anything.
The agencies cranking this stuff out are trying to please their clients. But they are also trying to impress their peers and win awards for creativity. Again, nothing wrong there; it just isnt necessarily advertising.
Somehow the Super Bowl has, over the years, become a sort of 'people's choice awards of advertising.' A crowd-sourced evocation of whoever created the strongest impression across a population reeling from the after-effect of too many carbs and an overflow of adult beverages. As the following article explains, ads should have immediacy, relevance and utility. It is not clear that Clydesdale horses, cynical talking infants and a host of other animatronic inspirations will do that. So you have a choice: you can be superior and critical, or you can shut up, grab another beer and enjoy the show. Which is probably the point. JL
Jonathan Baskin comments in Forbes:
The Super Bowl is going to be another ritual self-immolation for brands and the agencies responsible for the ads we’ll see. The spots will feature jokes, sex, and convoluted, crowdsourced set-ups intended to get us to laugh or sob and then vote for our favorites. They’ll use every trick in the book to do it.
The problem is that the book from which these tricks are borrowed isn’t about advertising. It’s a special events pamphlet. A tweet’s worth of advice. A how-to for a beauty pageant that will be aggressively fought in talent and swimsuit competitions, and then fumbled completely when the contestants are asked “what would you give to 100 million people if they were watching?” Since all of them will answer “entertainment,” they’ll all be forgotten in a matter of days, irrespective of who wins.
We know what makes for a good ad. Pros have been making them for over a century. While the media and some of the details have changed, the basic tenets have not. Funny and sexy don’t make up for the lack of these core qualities, and no amount of extended exposure across social platforms does, either.
So if you really want to rate which ads are good, consider looking for the following:
Immediacy. Everyone loves a good story but we’re an impatient species, and there have been many studies suggesting that we comprehend and remember better the sooner we know what we’re looking for. Many of the ads will take far too long to set-up their creative conceits, whether a joke or story. I watched one for Pepsi that didn’t get to the payoff until the last few seconds (up to that point it could have been a commercial for insurance, floor polish, or some new app). It’s the rare punchline that is worth the wait, no matter how entertaining it is along the way. Good ads are immediately obvious up front and then dimensionalize and reinforce a core idea all the way along. We won’t remember which brands sponsored the extended emotive stories or hilarious fart jokes. Hell, if you’re going to pay for the time, why not use it?
Relevance. Ads that matter to people are far more effective than those that are merely amusing or interesting. Relevance isn’t about viewer demographics or time they spend engaging with the marketing, because those are only the mechanics formerly intended to get you to connect with a product or service (see point above). So when Doritos crowdsources its commercial, or Pepsi chooses to use its ad spend to show consumers pictures of themselves that they’ve submitted prior to the game, it’s truly medium over message. Marketing for marketing’s sake. Advertiser self-love. The true measure of ad relevance is quite simple: do you catch yourself saying or thinking “I need that” or “that’s a good idea?” It’s not your reaction to the ad but to the product or service it’s wrapped around that matters.
Utility. Getting a viewer, listener, or reader to do something is the ultimate measure of a good ad. Views, likes, and forwards don’t count because all they measure is the lifetime of the creative content (which usually has no substantive connection to the sponsoring brand, so an infinite lifespan of viewers learning nothing useful is no more valuable than wasting their time once). Kia will run a spot that I like, in which a car gets stuck behind a series of vehicles you’d want to pass (stinky horses, a truck loaded with missiles). I hope people will be inspired to visit Kia’s web site and find overt opportunities to schedule test drives. Ditto for dealer showroom visits over the next few weeks. Those actions will lead to other actions that get folks into cars they’ve bought or leased, thereby proving the utility of the originating commercial. Conversely, when Bud runs one of its endless spots, ask yourself what you’re supposed to do with that content. If the answer is simply remember it, it has no utility. And you won’t.
None of these attributes will feature prominently in the votes and rankings of Super Bowl ads that we’ll start seeing in real-time during the broadcast. Experts who should know better will sing the praises of jokes, sex, and animals. Brand awareness and likability will fluctuate up or down on graphs intended to make real such ethereal intangibles. The “best” spots will be those that are the funniest, saddest, and most shared.
My bet is very few of them will deliver any immediacy, relevance, or utility. On that basis, we won’t see many good ads tomorrow.
Maybe that’s why we see so few of them all year long.
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