It’s that time of year again. A time when we gather around the TV for the Super Bowl with our family, friends, and some of the year’s most ill-advised food choices. However, an increasing percentage of the game’s multi-million viewers have a second screen in the form of a smartphone or tablet, where they’re conversing with thousands of additional friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like. Anymore, just as much of that social chatter is devoted to the Super Bowl ads during the breaks as the plays on the field.
It’s been a long standing tradition here to do a Monday Morning Ad Quarterback post, recapping the winners and losers in marketing’s main event. As two of the central topics on this blog are branding and social media, I’ve selected a winning ad for Best Brand Building and Best Social Media Integration. Criteria on brand building has to do with who makes the strongest statement on who they are or what they do as a brand. Social media integration is selected based on the on-air social component as well as online chatter.
And, to borrow a page from award show red carpet recaps, we’ll also explore a few brand missteps with What Were They Thinking?!?
With that, let’s kick-off of our Monday Morning Ad Quarterback round-up.
Best Ad – Brand Building: Dodge Ram “Farmer”
Let me be clear. In preparing to write this post I would have preferred to to pick something other than Chrysler, for the sheer fact that I selected their Clint Eastwood spot last year and Eminem the year before. This year, with their Jeep spot narrated by Oprah they were off to a great start. However, late in the game they released a Dodge Ram ad set a Paul Harvey speech from a 1978 FFA national convention extolling the virtues of farmers superimposed over still images depicting the hard-working, ag lifestyle.
This simple yet powerful ad also led to a significant amount of social chatter. Let’s take a look at why this ad was so effective and what you and your brand can learn from it.
- Consistency Without Boredom — With both Oprah and Paul Harvey, Chrysler again continued their theme of using a quintessentially American voices as brand spokespersons. However, each spot is district and different with it’s own look and feel. Rather than leading out the Clydesdales every few years like Budweiser, they’ve found a consistent theme that can be executed various ways.
- Standing Out Quietly — Just like their Eastwood “Half-Time” spot, “Farmer” is quieter fare when compared to the cheers of the crowd, explosions in big blockbuster movie trailers, and the broad humor of those aiming for the 18-24 male demographic. This difference in volume draws you in and compels you to listen. From there, the strong writing takes you along for the journey …
- Story Matters — As brand strategist Chuck Kent tweeted about the spot, “Honest #storytelling trumps gratuitous yucks.” Many advertisers work to make the loudest noise with their ads, often employing gross-out humor or sexual innuendo (Cough! GoDaddy!). The harder play is to tell a story that both engages your audience and advances your brand. Chrysler began this tradition with Eminem two years ago and continues it today.
- Know Your Audience — Finally, it’s worth noting that instead of pandering to the masses that make up the Super Bowl audience, Dodge made a clear choice to speak to their customers and potential customers by targeting the farmer/ag audience. As Brand Against the Machine author John Morgan noted on Twitter, “Dodge proved with their ad that they know their audience better than every other brand who ran an ad tonight.”
Best Ad – Social Media Integration: Oreo “Whisper Fight”/Power Outage Response
As noted above the distinction of social media integration is based on a couple of different fronts. First, like last year, it was hard to swing a dead cat without hitting a hashtag at the end of the spot. Too many brands rely on this — or simply slapping the social icons at the end of their ads — as the extent of their social media integration. However a few brands, like Oreo, took things a step further.
As you can see, the fight that breaks out in the spot above is over the age-old question: what is the best part of an Oreo — the cookie or the creme? Rather than a Twitter-focused hashtag, Oreo asked users to go to Instagram to “choose a side.” Before the big game started, Oreo was sitting with somewhere around 2,200 followers on Instagram. At the time of this post, they had reached 34,000.
As far as short-term results this should lead to some nice brand engagement around their #CremeThis campaign (okay, the hashtag is lacking). Long term, this increase in followers leads to expanded reach and another powerful platform for communicating with their audience visually. And Oreo is a powerful brand when it comes to visuals. Last summer their Daily Twist Facebook campaign featured unique art based on special events or quirky days (Mars rover landing, anniversary of air conditioning, etc.).
They also demonstrated this prowess during the game’s most unexpected moment — the 30-minute power outage that put the whole evening on pause. Many took to Twitter to pass the time during this outage. While a few brands had time to get a quick quip out, Oreo took advantage of the moment and quickly created the fun and timely image below that was shared and reshared across various social channels garnering some 13,000 retweets, over 6,000 shares on Facebook, and numerous favorites and likes.
Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013
The lesson here that all brands can learn is to always be on the look out for those little moments that you can quickly transform into compelling content.
What Were They Thinking?!?
Let’s be honest. Not all of the ads were great. In fact, a few left us saying “huh?” or worse still, “I’m not sure they got their 4 million dollars worth.” Here were some of the evenings strangest entries …
- Do I even need to mention Go Daddy? Although their first ad was their usual, sexist bar-lowering dreck, their second entry of the night featuring dozens of people having the same idea and not buying the domain was actually relevant to their brand and audience.
- Magic, outer space, and robots abound (naturally). Toyota and Kia each went to other-wordly lengths to create confusing spots. Toyota opted for a genie in the form of The Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco while Kia again featured space babies and creepy fembots.
- Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan (with an assist from Bob Odenkirk) were funny enough in their Samsung ad about the #NextBigThing but after seeing the spot I can’t tell you a single reason why Samsung’s next thing will be big.
While there weren’t any glaring missteps, many of the ads were just bland — Crowdsourced Doritos ads, E*trade babies, Budweiser Clydesdales, an up-with-people message from Coke, and so on. Given the size of the stage and the scope of the event, it seems like many entries could have been bolder, or at the very least bigger and better.
What Do You Think?
Those are my picks. What’s your color commentary on this year’s ads? What insights have you heard around the water cooler? What’s the social buzz? Remember, you can view all of this year’s Super Bowl ads on the official YouTube channel.
