Outside of Indianapolis and Chicago, most of the U.S. will have forgotten who won Super Bowl XLI by Monday evening. Nationwide, most of the ads were forgotten by the time viewers fell asleep Sunday night.
Enough about how bad the ads were in general. [Along with the halftime show.] Many ads deserve their own special recognition and I'd like to highlight some of them here, by category.
Most violent:
1. King Pharma, BeatYourRisk.com
2. Bud Light, Fist Bump/Slaps
3. CareerBuilder.com, Promotion Island
Most use of sex:
1. GoDaddy
2. Chevy's Consumer Generated Ad
3. Snickers, Chest Hair
Most emotional appeal:
1. Coke, Time Line
2. NFL, Brett Favre
3. Budweiser, Fake Dalmatian
Most use of facts:
1. Toyota, Tundra actual demonstrations (and an interesting contrast to their recent ads)
2. Revlon, Sheryl Crow on tour
3. Salesgenie.com (j/k)
More takeaways and my 2007 Super Bowl ad review:
- Consumer generated ads weren't any better or worse than the "regular" ads. Ad agencies need not fear consumers taking over the world of 30-second spots - but that's not what social computing is about...
- Integrated marketing didn't show up, again. The only advertiser guaranteed to drive traffic to their site? GoDaddy. Biggest misses? FedEx uses another grey-on-white 1 second end-cap logo. Impossible vanity URLs like rocksolidretirement.com and snackstrongproductions.com. HP lists a vanity toll-free number (800-525-MYHP). I hope this is part of an A/B test...
- Guerilla search ads? Non-existent. Lots of cheap keywords out there like "map robot" for TomTom, "chest hair" for Philips, or "promotion island" for Monster...
And my favorite ads, purely by personal entertainment value:
- Coke, GTA. This ad was produced for cinema and launched in August 2006. Maybe not true machinima, but great that they used the same style.
- Garmin, Maposaurus. I'm not going out to buy a GPS, but I was laughing. (Then I said, WTF?)
- Budweiser, Shawn Carter + Don Shula. Love the 007 style.
If corporations really want to make consumers happy, they should forego costly Super Bowl ads and instead invest in a Chief Customer Officer, a single person of power charged with putting him or herself in the customers’ mind.
But instead they spend their time and money making sure their ad is funny and entertaining, which doesn’t mean it sells more products. A good marketer surprises consumers by giving them new ideas on how and why to use a particular product. Ads developed by typical people or starring famous celebrities may get laughs, but are unlikely to generate sales. For every dollar you spend you should be seeing a dollar back and I sincerely doubt that these companies are generating an additional $2.6 million due to these Super Bowl ads.
Marketers need to stop thinking that marketing HAS to be creative. It HAS to sell goods and services. Sometimes the least creative marketing is the most effective.
Mark Stevens
CEO of MSCO
www.msco.com/blog
Posted by: Mark Stevens | 05 February 2007 at 11:48 AM