Super Bowl Advertising Insanity

I've updated a vintage Brand Autopsy riff on the Super Bowl advertising insanity and recorded it as a short audiobog.

It's goofy stuff.

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DOWNLOAD AUDIOBLOG HERE
[2:12 minutes | 2.1 MB]

Comments

[mhmh]

Here's the Monday water cooler talk on the GoDaddy ad...

"So we're starting to get a bunch of complaints from female employees about GoDaddy. Legal says we have some exposure to "hostile workplace" charges. So who is GoDaddy's competition? We better move our domain names off GoDaddy just to be safe."

Here is a big fat clue: Women in technology (and advertising) hate these ads. Passionately. Even if they tell you otherwise. They are talking to each other about what can be done. Some of them are lawyers. End of clue.

[Mike]

So here's more water cooler talk tomorrow morning.

"How about that ad with the dead fly?"

"Huh?"

"You know, they are in the hospital... and they kill the fly with the chargers... and then the mom and daughter come in..."

"Oh yeah... that was tacky..."

"Who was that anyway?"

"I think... um..."

"AMERIQUEST."

"Really? Really?"

"And what do they do????"

The end.

[nope]

Those GoDaddy ads are bad news if you are running a corporate site.

Get as far away from them as you can.

Here's the deal. The gals in IT have to log in to manage our hundreds of brand name variations. Those gals in IT are pissed off as hornets about GoDaddy's titty commericials, but even more so at Bob Parson's blog.

Maybe you think the gals in IT don't talk to the gals in HR or the gals in Legal, but they do talk and honey they are pissed off like you would not believe at the moment. My sister is an HR lawyer staying at my house this weekend. Suffice it to say she is very busy on her email at the moment.

GoDaddy has screwed the pooch on this one. At least a couple of fortune 500 companies are leaning on their IT departments to sever all ties with GoDaddy as of tomorrow morning. Leaning as in "memos to management about possible 'exposure' re: 'hostile work environment' re: GoDaddy". If you know what I'm sayin.

You gotta hand it to these bizchicks. When they get pissed, they definitely make things happen.

[no kidding]

No kidding man, don't screw with the "gals in legal". Not pretty. Nope.

[Andy Havens]

I've now read (and listened) to all the Super Bowl commentary here, mostly regarding the Go Daddy ad, but in general slamming the idea of spending big bucks on large-scale, retail advertising, as personified by the Mac Daddy of all TV spots, the 30-second Super Bowl ad.

I'm confused.

The argument that the Superbowl Ad spend dollars could have been "better spent" on other marketing stuff reminds me of one of my dad's favorite nonsense jokes: "Did you ride the bus today or take your lunch?"

Most of the stuff being suggested as "a better way to spend a couple million bucks" isn't just apples and oranges, but apples and lighter fluid. Or apples and bungy cords. It's different stuff. Just because it's all "marketing" doesn't mean you get to trade one bucket of money for the other and call it macaroni.

High volume, low impact, big-audience retail ads for a consumer/commodity market like Go Daddy's serve a specific purpose. If you've got a sophisticated, full-featured marketing plan in place that requires filling and maintaining a pipeline at a variety of different points, and touching customers at a variety of different levels, you simply can't substitute one part of the plan for another. Saying "take that $2.3 million of Super Bowl advertising and spend it on PR" is like saying, "Sugar isn't as healthy as corn, so substitute corn for sugar in your recipe for cornbread." Blech. Doesn't work. You need all the ingredients.

Yes -- for a long time, many big advertisers relied pretty much on massive ad campaigns as their sole way of getting the word out. Why? Because it worked and it was, frankly, pretty cheap on a cost-per-sale basis. TV, radio and print. Bingo, bango, bongo. He who has the most dollars and matches it with the best creative wins. See "History of Advertising."

More channels (both in TV and elsewhere), better informed/educated customers, the discovery that customer service = lifelong customers = good ROI... all kinds of stuff have led to other marketing disciplines that provide great benefits to companies and customers.

But I am getting really, really tired of this idea that because other, new ideas are good, therefore the old ideas must be bad. That's as much a case of "wrong-think" as the idea that the old wisdom must be true because it always has been.

Good ads work. Bad ads don't. Same as it ever was. And guess what? The same holds true with every other kind of marketing campaign, even the touchy-feely, customer-centric, word-of-mouth, Web 2.0, newest-and-brightest stuff we're all so jazzed about. Good works, bad don't.

In the absence of other data, name recognition drives purchasing behavior, especially in retail categories. That's Go Daddy's market. They're betting (and I bet it's a good bet) that the millions of people who see their ad, and look -- for the first time -- for a domain name host, will recognize their brand name and will be influenced by having seen the ad and having some memory of the name. More than 100 years of advertising research have shown, again and again, that this is the case. People gravitate towards products they've heard of.

I don't know where Go Daddy's sales numbers are, nor if they've leveled-off in terms of "self-selectors" in their category. I don't know how saturated the domain name market is, nor if they think that they've moved into a phase in the market where name recognition is important, but that's my guess. If that is the case, then big, retail ad buying is a good bet. It's part (not all) of a brand strategy. It's the little seeds you plant. It's not the whole garden, for Pete's sake, but it's lots of seeds scattered in a wide, wide arc.

A long-term, wide ranging brand strategy has many parts. Some look and sound like sophisticated, one-on-one, word-of-mouth, New Age, classy, friendly, Irish Pubs where everybody has a chance to talk and be heard and have a customer-centric conversation.

Some parts of a great brand strategy, though, do sound like cheesy pick-up lines. Why? Because cheesy pick-up lines are funny, fast and (when delivered by a good-looking guy in a $2 million suit) often work.

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Andy ... nice riff (as usual).

I'll sum-up my stance on Super Bowl advertising this way ... to win, which means creating brand awareness resulting in brand preference, an advertiser must hit a grand slam home run.

Last year (2005) in the Major Leagues, 132 grand slams were hit. Compare that with the 8,863 doubles hit in the same year. The higher percentage play is to go for a double and not for the grand slam. I’d much rather get on base with a double than try to clear the bases with a grand slam. Dig?

Same goes with marketing. Yeah, creating a whiz-bang Super Bowl ad is sexy and fun and it may result in hitting a grand slam. (And as we know, chicks dig the long ball.) However … I’d rather swing for doubles by finding ways to get creative using more tactile ideas which not only engage customers in the experience of the product or service but also treat customers as being smart and savvy. As a marketer, I’d much rather spend my dollars to make the product/service experience better and spend money towards ideas that get people to sample the product/service. Doubles add up and runs will score. Double dig?

Andy … I’m curious to know … which Super Bowl ads worked for you? Which products will now be in your consideration set following seeing their Super Bowl ad?

[DUST!N]

Well, I don't know about you John, but I'm was sold on that Jessica Simpson pizza ad. I'm going to eat there every day. Jessica Simpson pizza.

J...

Je..

Hey, there's no Jessica Simpson Pizza in my yellow pages. Geez! Guess that's what I get for living in Tulsa. Enough of this! I'm moving to a bigger market. Now I need a job somewhere else. Somewhere big. Somewhere happenin'...

Somewhere like Austin, TX!

I know, I'll look it up on that 'I work with monkeys' website.
i-w-o-r-k-w-i-t-h-m-o-n-k-e-y-s.com
Huh? That didn't work!
i-w-o-r-k-w-i-t-h-j-a-c-k-a-s-s-e-s.com
Hey, that didn't work either!

Oh, forget it all. I'm just going to go upstairs and take a shower with my Fabio shampoo. I know, I know, don't say it. I know you're all getting ready to tell me...

I don't need to use shampoo since I'm bald.

[Andy Havens]

Thanks, John.

I do think, though, that the baseball metaphor is confusing. If a company bets all it's marketing money on one big ad spend, yes... that's like taking your last at bat, heaving one big swing and trying to go for the bleachers. And if there's no men on base and you're behind by more than one run... that's dumb.

But for some retailers, a Super Bowl ad is one of many ads, and the buy is part of an overall strategy. To use the baseball metaphor, it's a big "at bat," but it's not the "whole enchillada." And if the pitcher throws you an easy pitch... you swing away.

Where many companies go wrong (and it's not just in advertising or marketing), is when they assume that "Tactic A brought Result A for Company A" means that "Tactic A will bring Result A for my company." There's a raft of back-end info that goes into smart advertising decisions, and (as you pointed out) in the .COM era, companies were making bad decisions hand-over-fist. Some of those decisions involved Super Bowl advertising. Many more of them involved the basics of company financing, stock valuation, employee options, product and service pricing, etc. So to say that .COM's screwed-the-pooch on Super Bowl ads, and, therefore, big-buy retail ads are bad for tech companies... well, you'd have to say that just about every form of business is bad for tech companies, since many of the dot-bombs screwed up in so many fun and fabulous ways that are oh-so-clear with 20/20 hindsight.

There's a neat article here:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=viewfeature&id=700

On some Super Bowl advertising basics. One of the things the author points out is that some advertisers, famously Master Lock, didn't advertise in order to reach end-customers at all, but to influence their hardware-store owner merchandisers to give them more shelf space. Great idea -- and it worked for them for many years. That's a good example of fitting the right tool to the right situation.

Which is the whole point of marketing -- making good things happen for your company. If big-box, high volume retail ads do the trick, that's great. And by many metrics, they still do work for certain types of traffic drivers, for name recognition, and for cementing brand loyalty among shoppers who "lean between" multiple brands. Can you treat a customer as "smart and savvy" in a 30-second ad spot? No. But here's the secret -- they don't expect you to. I don't come to the garden hose expecting champagne. And a good advertiser doesn't expect to get 20 million "wildly excited, super-satisfied customers" out of a Super Bowl ad spot. What they do expect to do is move the needle on name recognition by 3/10ths of a percent, which can translate into $4 million in sales, if your product is in that stage of its lifecycle. Or (in the case of Master Lock), they expect preference among store owners to shift such that you get better shelf service, translating into better sales. As long as you net-out positive because of the ad... bingo. It worked.

The kind of marketing you're advocating when you talk about treating customers as "smart and savvy" is great, too. I'm in no way dissing that. But, again, you're comparing apples and diesel fuel. If I want to have a smart and savvy conversation with someone, first I have to introduce myself. First they have to have *heard* of me at all. Some conversations even require that they be a customer, or have been a customer for quite some time, or know a customer who can refer them. Many of the best "smart and savvy" conversations are like "Act 2" of a great drama. Most of the best tension and real action happens in Act 2. But without Act 1, Act 2 doesn't make much sense.

I'm also not appologizing for Badvertising. Much big box TV creative -- not just in the Super Bowl -- is pure crap. That's because bad is simply easier to do than good. But then we end up, again, saying that because "one Super Bowl ad is bad," therefore "advertising in the Super Bowl" is bad. Wrong. When we generalize like that, we do our clients a disservice, because we remove possibly effective tools from the box.

There are good reasons to be warry of big, sparkly, shiny TV campaigns, and you've pointed them out -- agencies love to do them for their portfolio rather than for their clients best interests; they can spend bad money quickly; they can move the needle the wrong way without good metrics. But they can also do more for a company's brand than any other kind of marketing. The Apple "1984" ad, the Budweiser Frogs, the Xerox monks, the Monster.com "When I grow up, I want to be a brown noser." -- these are all Super Bowl ads that did tremendous things for their companies, well beyond the expected dollars put into the buys. They helped propel their companies into "icon" status. Which is the highest rank of "brand" you can aspire to.

[DUST!N]

Andy, all joking and cynisism aside, you make some great points.

The Wharton article is interesting. I wish it dived deeper though.

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“With a social setting that includes multiple families, there is more potential for word of mouth to take place all at once.”
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DUST!N says: Hadn't thought of that. But...

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Sometimes ads are too successful in drawing attention to themselves. “They build awareness for the ad and people forget the brand. That can be a danger if an ad is too clever in its execution.”
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DUST!N says: I've read johnmoore before discuss whether you want people remarking about your company or about your advertising. Salient.

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To build positive association, marketers need to convey a message about the core values of their company and its products if they are to capitalize on Super Bowl visibility, Bolton notes.
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DUST!N says: Easier said than done. Who accomplished this? FedEx and Dove? Maybe I'm being overly critical here.

Don't forget...
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“Obviously some ads do well and get positive buzz, but some ads are trashed in the media or around the water cooler the next day. In that case, a negative association is attached to the brand.”
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DUST!N says: See above comments pertaining to GoDaddy.

I agree with much of what you're saying Andy. I think maybe I get worked up about the blemish some of these ads place on creative advertising and marketing in general. Much of it is more clever than creative in my opinion.