Who Won The Super Bowl?
I didn’t even know who was playing until I saw the headlines in my RSS feeds this morning. (Okay, if you’d held a gun to my Mom’s head…I think I could have guessed the Patriots. But the other team? Not a clue.)
The only reason I used to watch the game was for the commercials. Now, thanks to a gazillion bloggers and YouTube, I don’t have to even do that. Here’s a Gizmodo “award” list with embedded video.
Three questions:
1. Are any of the companies who spent millions on the Super Bowl ads going to see a return on that investment?
2. Will any of the people that watched the game remember the commercials after - like - today?
3. Will the people who remember the commercials remember the companies who advertised? (”Yeah, the Terminator ad was cool - who did that one?”)
Read More: Super Bowl Rant by Steve Yastrow at Tom Peters. Steve’s first question:
My first question: Why is it better to reach more people at one time? As the size of an advertising audience increases, you are also reaching many people who are not interested in your product. One of the big Super Bowl advertising stories this year is that 45% of the 90 million-person audience is expected to be female. Because of this, brands like Tide (P&G) and Sunsilk (Unilever) are buying Super Bowl ads focused on female buyers. Ok … but that means they will also be reaching about 50 million disinterested males, at about 3 cents each. That’s a lot of pennies.
Pssst! News Flash for P&G and Unilever! Women’s lives don’t revolve around laundry. …We don’t lie awake worrying about ring around the collar these days (If we ever really did. Knowing my Mom and her friends, I don’t think so.)
(What was I doing yesterday? Reading The Ghost by Robert Harris. A great “sit down, dive in and not resurface until finished” read. Oh, and I took a long power walk with my iPod, watched the snow clouds roll in over the mountains.)
P.S. This isn’t simply a “woman thing.” My Mom was glued to the set - and can talk football stats from the past 60 years, including college and pro ball. However, I’ve never, ever heard her say, “Wow! I’ve gotta run out and buy….” after watching the big game.
Tags: marketing, marketing troubleshooting, advertising, Super Bowl, marketing to women
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February 4th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Mary,
Glad you chose that passage to quote. It captures the confusion over the value of few vs many. Communicating with more people at one time always brings compromise.
In a few days I will post a video of an interview I gave to fox business network on thus topic. At one point the interviewer said, “Steve, there are people at Fox who want to turn your audio off.” Cool. (Fox was the network charging $100K per second)
February 4th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Steve,
Thanks for dropping by. (And better look under your car before starting it!)
The SB is a creaky relic from the old days of interruption marketing - when companies made billions cranking out a lot of average products for average people at an average price - and we had limited media. Now, all bets are off - as people can talk to each other (and boy, do we! Blogging, email, etc. etc.)…and we’ve got about 5 zillion options for getting information.
February 4th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
“Women’s lives don’t revolve around laundry”
There’s an Advert on our local TV. The little boy is struggling to get ready for school. His harassed Mum comes over to help him and discovers a “terrible” stain on his shirt. The rest of the advert then goes on discussing how “Mum” shouldn’t waste her time doing all the ironing, cleaning etc and still have stains on school shirts.
My wife and myself were sitting in bed one morning watching this the other week. Over coffee. As one does.
The advert reached a natural pause and my delightful wife, in a voice of total scorn and malevolence goes: “*Idiot*”.
I completely lost it. Tears running down my face from laughing so hard.
That advert still seriously ticks her off. And ever since our little boy was born has been a full time Mum, as it were, who does much of the washing etc.
The truly ironic part? We actually like that particular companies products. Or rather… Used to.
Cheers!
- Steve
Apparently, by definition, a part time Dad…
February 4th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
We just posted our 4th annual study of how well super bowl advertisers integrated online and offline advertising - we’ll be writing more about this on our blog, but the preliminary findings are already up on our site: Super Bowl XLII Scorecard.
February 5th, 2008 at 8:00 am
Hi Mary!
Just to pick up on the women and laundry point, it never ceases to amaze me how ads “targeted to women” have little or no relevance to me or are down right offensive. Someone has to tell these people that we’re not all June Cleaver AND that June probably wouldn’t be interested in their pitch if she were here today!!!
My husband says that I’m just a freak. I’m am just sooooo tired of being “marketed to” in completely irrelevant ways.
Let’s not even start with age, now that we’ve ranted on gender. I may not be a “digital native” but I’m a naturalized citizen! I use more social networking apps than my teenagers - yet no one cares about me on that front!!
Ugh - go get ‘em girl!!
Ann
February 5th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Yep, don’t get me started on the Gen Y “Hey, we’re the cool tech kids - you old people can’t even grok Flash web sites…or iPods…or texting…or YouTube…or…or…”) Sure, every generation thinks they’ve invented rebellion, sex, coolness, but some of the so-called marketing Gen Y experts really irritate me. (As I’ve blogged over at Lip-Sticking, Marketing: Not All Women Are Moms.)
And, really companies - give up on the pink paint. I don’t even like the damned color!
February 7th, 2008 at 8:21 am
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