Super Bowl Ads: 2008 Was No 1984

While the greatest majority of people skips commercials, the Super Bowl is different. Sunday night Twitter was alight -- and I was pleased to see stable -- with buzz about the game, and the ads. Jeremiah Owyang created a Twitter ID so we could tally the votes. Ad naming conventions became a problem, I do not know whether the tallying was crowdsourced as someone suggested. I'll be curious to see if the outcome is consistent with voting elsewhere.

If you did not see the ads, BusinessWeek has 18 of the 2008 contenders. AOL Sports has them all, organized by quarter. You can vote on the AOL site if you sign up, or you can vote here in the comments. I watched them all.

Just to run through a couple of figures. While most marketing budgets this year are being stretched to the maximum, each :30 ad cost $2.7 million to run for a total of $170 million or $225, counting the pre-game ones, for Fox coffers. And it was a good game that kept everyone watching to the last second.

I enjoyed the well told story of "Mr. Oboe", the NFL ad, and the good execution of the "It's Mine" Coke ad by Wieden+Kennedy. But many of the ads showed signs of retreads. Tide hit it on the ahem, stain, very nicely. Some originality (a bit overdone) with Audi8 and Justin Timberlake "Magnetic Attraction" Pepsi. Doritos was memorable with "Music Video" by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners -- a nice touch that was quite touching.

Nothing there was groundbreaking. Nothing game changing. Not like the 1984 Apple spot, which was so shocking it changed the company's fortunes and the business of advertising.

Have we grown tired of making our ads work? The problem is this: 24 years later, the talking head on the video screen is today's advertising status quo. We're waiting for the next runner to rush down the aisle and swing her hammer into Big Advertising's eye.

Comments

[Austin]

I'm not sure if we have grown tired of making our ads work as much as the country's collective consciousness is one of 'let's play it safe' which so often curtails the creative process....check out...http://rimfire.typepad.com/rimfire_communications/2008/02/keep-it-simple.html

[Stephen Denny]

Valeria: the Super Bowl spots, generally speaking, were a gross waste of money for the brands doing the spending. Budweiser had how many ads? Four? About $10 million, which is a small number for a Fortune 500 company of their size and ad budget, but a waste nonetheless. They will sell no more beer because of their Rocky Clydesdale spot. Or Breathing Fire (why did they do this?). Or any of the others. CPG brands *very very rarely* even break even on advertising.

The real winners? Sales Genie, who managed to insult both people of Indian as well as Chinese extraction, and Go Daddy, who reported a 4X increase in traffic over last year's ad. Both are web-based companies selling products at high margins. Pepsi at least had a strong call to action with their iTunes promotion. Doritos wasted money on a very nice girl's video that didn't sell any chips.

Advertising is about SELLING STUFF. How many advertisers remembered that on Sunday night? This is an exercise in corporate hubris. Yikes.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Austin -- making an ad work means it is designed to sell. I would buy the Tide stain removal, so that to me was a win. The creative process needs to be at the service of the value props to the business in that case.

@Stephen -- profit margins, music to my ears. And good thought on call to action. I admit the Doritos ad appealed to me for entirely different reasons than buying the product.

[Jonathan]

Funny...the amazing Apple 1984 spot (I have been a lifelong Ridley Scott fan ever since) 'changed the game' by heralding the slow demise of a great business. Ads that don't communicate relevant, motivating information that leads to purchase are fun and entertaining, but ultimately a waste of time. No amount of conversation really matters, does it, unless there's a chronology that drives business-measurable behaviors. So your posts here make complete sense to me; the comparison for analysis shouldn't necessarily be 1984, but rather the other 364 days of the year in 2008...or 2007...or any year. Ads should sell something other than entertainment. I've mused a bit about this at DIM BULB if you'd like to check it out: http://dimbulb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/and-then-the-ba.html

[Valeria Maltoni]

Jonathan:

I remember the very entertaining campaign Nissan ran a while back on TV -- everyone loved the commercials, nobody bought the cars. We have moved so far away from the campaigns that really burnished brands and sold products!