More Superbowl
Looking through Creativity today reminded me to write more on the Super Bowl.
“And advertising people wonder why the public views them with contempt. The industry’s annual showcase Sunday — otherwise known as the Super Bowl — featured commercials that peddled soft porn, sold soda pop as a drug, trivialized charitable causes, ridiculed ethnic Americans, terrified small children and contemplated running over a sissy with a car.” -Bob Garfield
Looks like I wasn’t the only one! I was wondering why I didn’t get excited about many of the ads this year… now I know, it was indeed a bad crop. While I was watching, my friends and I had bewildered expressions on our faces with a few ads. With the Panda ad especially, not only was it not funny at all but we would have been afraid to laugh for how politically incorrect it was. I love touting my agency experiences to people but maybe I should run away from it this year…
To see all the ads, check out the AdAge feature.
It’s much easier to be a critic than to come up with a good idea for an ad, that’s for sure, but in the case of CareerBuilder it’s almost like the agency of record tried to come up with the worst thing imaginable. I actually didn’t think the monkey commercial was that bad, especially after this year’s spots. I had a negative reaction to them. To be honest, not only do I not even remember what the spots were, but my gut feeling about them is 100% negative… I can’t imagine that’s a good thing.
Lisa Haverty made a great point, and it’s one I hear and repeat over and over: “Unless Your Spot Has Fundamental Cognitive Elements, No One Will Recall Your Brand”. Or more simply, it’s the product, stupid! You can’t just launch into a short film and slap your logo at the end of it– that’s known as a piggyback ad. Your ad needs to have a punchline, that visceral “a-ha” moment. Again Lisa says, “The hope is that the piggyback ad will enjoy some reflected glory from the ad it clutches on to, but that’s not how the brain works.” Make the ad about the product in some way, unless of course you work for Budweiser. They are so deeply entrenched in Super Bowl advertising lore that they are exempt from this line of thinking.
I doubt anyone reading this is going to run Superbowl ads, but these principles apply to every kind of advertising and marketing communication, whether print or motion:
- Remember, give me a punchline, not a piggyback.
- Learn something about how people think.
- Test your ads!
