It seems pointless to post a blog entry about marketing this morning without discussing the SuperBowl advertising phenomenon. SuperBowl Sunday is the one day of the year when people actually turn on the television to watch commercials, and they expect to see Madison Avenue pull out all the stops. The only thing more entertaining than watching the ads, which were funny this year but not all that memorable, is watching the marketing pundits analyze the commercials and the impact of social media.
In most regards, this year's commercial fest was nothing new. Ever since the monumental buzz generated by Coca-Cola's Mean Joe Green ad in 1980, a big part of the SuperBowl draw is the watercooler talk that turns the ads into a massive social event. If you can own the buzz storm, that $2.6 million dollars for a 30-second spot starts looking more reasonable. But this year also marks the entry of social media concepts into SuperBowl advertising, and this is where you can really start to see the fractures between Madison Avenue and Main Street.
This year, a few advertisers ran commercials created by consumers. Well, sort of. Chevy ran a contest among college students on the model of The Apprentice, and selected a concept from a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. But Chevy's ad agency produced the commercial, with the freshman, Katie Crabb, on the set. Dorito's on the other hand, put the call out for submissions publicly, and accepted commercials that were fully produced. The winning commercial was written, filmed and produced by a wedding photographer named Jared Cicon, who shot the ad with his own video camera and edited it on his home computer. After Dorito's selected 5 commercials to compete for the SuperBowl slot, they opened up voting to the public, and Jared's commercial aired.
What does this mean for advertising? You can hear the squirming on Madison Avenue. Simeon Roane, executive creative director at Publicis Groupe's New York office, sounded somewhat surprised at the quality of Jared's commercial when she commented for the Wall Street Journal last night:
"It's kind of scary that a consumer can come up with stuff that good."
Scary indeed. Because, you know, those consumers are so, well, Lowest Common Denominator. And as MSNBC's Allison Linn points out, any company that lets consumers make commercials is taking a big risk:
"The gamble may pay off, but such contests also carry a huge risk because there is no guarantee they will result in a commercial that’s any good."
Hmmm. I guess irony is truly dead. Having commercials produced by professional agencies is, in fact, a guarantee of quality. And if you turn your commercial over to consumers and it flops, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
“I don’t think saying it was produced by somebody in Nebraska or at home in a basement gives them an out,” said Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
But the NFL, along with Doritos, seems a little more impressed with the prospects of social media. The NFL staged its own commercial contest, in which 1700 fans pitched ideas from which a winner was chosen to be produced for the SuperBowl. The NFL's senior VP of marketing, Lisa Baird, was nervous about the prospects, but was ultimately won over.
“It’s clearly more than a fad and more than a way to get PR,” she said. “Here’s a very viable way to create authentic, sincere stories about your brand.”
And that, at the end of the day, is the fuel that is driving this social media groundswell. Authenticity. Sincerity. Consumers are tired of the clinical pitches marketing cooks up to drive them like efficient little consumer-bots to the point of purchase. It's not interesting. In fact, it's mostly annoying. We're smarter now, we're more engaged, and we're more connected. And if you can't tell a story that makes your product interesting, you better find someone who can. If it's an agency, great. Try to find one that doesn't look down their ivory tower ramparts on consumers.
But what if your customers are telling better stories than your agency? How would you know? Are you ready to hand them the megaphone?
Apple has enjoyed letting the customers do the advertising for years. Seems to have worked out nicely for them.
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66001,00.html
Posted by: Patricia | February 05, 2007 at 08:03 PM
Hi Patricia--
Thanks for the link--that's a great article. I remember when that ad went viral.
If you want to see the other side of the equation, check out this ad spoofing the latest Mac campaigns. (Warning, some adult language):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQECwm3erEs&mode=related&search=
/chris
Posted by: Chris Kenton | February 05, 2007 at 09:23 PM