Brand Rants

The Superbowl’s biggest winners were also its biggest losers

Why drive-to-web works

The winner of the populist vote in this year’s Super Bowl ad war is the Betty White Snickers commercial. According to the 2010 USA Today Ad Meter, the commercial received an 8.68/10 score. It was also the most talked about commercial the day after the Super Bowl.  

Do you think all that buzz was about fluffy nougat enveloped in gooey caramel and rich milk chocolate? No. Do you suppose they vote based on how many candy bars the spot would sell or how much brand equity it generated? Not likely. The buzz was about Betty and Abe. The votes were positive reinforcement delivered to the powers that be for not boring the pants off us with some P&G-inspired cliché. 

If you want to see the spot that will mostly likely generate the biggest business benefit, you’ll have to go all the way to the bottom of the Ad Meter ranking. There you will find the somewhat disjointed  “Wear the Pants” spot from Dockers. Out of the 63 commercials ranked, it placed number 59 and was one of the least talked about. 

But if you compare website traffic from the Super Bowl ads you see another story:  Dockers received an amazing 5010% increase in site traffic compared to Snickers.com, which received almost no noticeable boost in site traffic.  I’m sure the words “free pants people”  uttered during a recession didn’t hurt Docker’s traffic. 

With 106.5 million people watching, the Superbowl has become the de facto launch pad for major campaigns in the US. Advertisers spend millions on commercial production and website design to dress-up their brands for the event. And with CBS charging $3.01 million per 30 second spot, it’s smart to get the most for your money.  Which I feel is where most Superbowl advertisers this year fumbled. 

Out of the 60+ commercials that aired during the Super Bowl, most companies squander the chance to drive more eyes to their brand online. That would have provided the opportunity for advertisers to build relations with viewers during the off-season and perhaps convert them to brand fans by the time Superbowl XLV rolls around.  

And just to be clear, a URL super at the end of a spot is not drive-to-web (at least not in my book). A drive-to-web spot does just that: It provides a compelling reason to go to the website — like free pants. Of course the key to getting business out of any of this is having something of value online that will engage visitors in a relevant manner and encourage repeat visits. That in itself can be a lot more difficult than entertaining a football fan for 30 seconds.

But forget drive-to-web, you would think most of the spots aired last Sunday were produced in the 1980’s.  Hardly any even bothered to featured a URL. Or if they did, it was so small that it begged to be overlooked. Watch the Volkswagen and Honda Crosstour spots and you’ll see what I mean. The URL is there, but it’s tiny. It took me a couple of viewings to even notice it.

Comparing Ad Meter’s two highest rated commercials, Snickers and Doritos, to the far less popular HomeAway.com and Dockers spots, there is a profound difference in post-game site traffic.  According to Alexa rankings of daily page views site traffic for Snickers and Doritos remained flat leading up to the game and received little additional traffic during and after the game. 

Compare that with the skyrocketing site traffic of Homeaway.com and Dockers. That’s because despite their low appeal, the two spots managed to entice viewers online. 

According to a July 2009 report by ICOM, the effectiveness of broadcast TV at driving consumers to the web is 17.8%. During the Super Bowl, that translated to a potential 19 million people looking at an advertiser’s website from just one ad. By using an obvious drive-to-web message, companies could have continued the fun online and built even more brand equity, loyalty and engagement in ways that TV simply can’t. For the most part, that opportunity was lost. 

Doritos didn’t even encourage people to see all the Crashthesuperbowl.com spots, which featured more fan created content on their site. 

VW had a small link to their Punch Dub url that is hidden under their big VW logo. 

Where was Dr. Pepper’s drive to record your own version of Dr. Love to join the never ending song? They paid for the KISS song, and that’s not cheap. 

Sure, men marching across a field in their jockey shorts lacks the entertainment value of seeing Betty White tackled face down in the mud. But Snickers missed a chance to send people to their site to see the other Aretha Franklin/Liza Minelli spot and perhaps provide some value to candy-lovers that would keep them buzzing and returning to the site during the off-season.  

Today brands are spending millions to create original content for both TV and the web, often times under the same campaign theme.  But in many cases, viewers would never know it. In today’s economy every dollar counts more than ever. That’s why I believe most, if not all, spots should incorporate some form of drive-to-web messaging coupled with a web concept that makes it worth the trip. And that required planning web activities in from the start both strategically and creatively. 

Brand managers need to break down silos between traditional medias, new media and PR to get all of their promotional efforts working in unison and delivering more return from their marketing spend. Spots that do that will get my vote at next year’s Superbowl (unless the Patriots make it, then I’ll be too wrapped up in the game to care about the spots). 

Old dogs & new tricks: Saatchi and the Yaris social media debackle

Four years into the social media surge and I'm still not convinced that many of the large agency networks get it. The same way they didn't get branding in the late 80's, or the internet in the early 90's. The large agency chains that populate conglomerates like Omnicom, WPP and Interpublic seem stuck one evolutionary step away from their origins as media brokers. It's been 100 years since James Walter Thompson retrofitted a creative department to his media brokerage. Since that brave step, agencies have never demonstrated any capacity to evolve further. If they can't see 15% commission in it, they're not interested. 

Today, media commissions are usually half that and the media landscape has been turned upside-down and inside-out: Yet the agency groups at the top of our industry's food chain seem determined not to adapt. Yes they are "using" social media, but they tend to use it as fodder to push through their traditional media channels. Like buying a Model T Ford in 1908 and then hitching horse to it and using it as a buggy. The example of the Yaris social media debacle in Australia is the latest case in point. 

Long story short, Saatchi created a rather lame film competition to launch Yaris without having bothered to build a community first. As one might expect, no one cared. Saatchi panicked and brought in a ringer to make a film that not only "won" the competition under dubious circumstances but also wound up being so offensive and off-brand that it triggered a major wave of negative publicity. I first learned about it when my TAAN colleague John MCCallum posted this video on his agency's blog.

For the full story on what happened behind the scenes, read Tim Burrowes excellent post on mUmBRELLA titled How Saatchi & Saatchi’s Toyota social media disaster unfolded. It is a case study in how NOT to approach social media. It should be required reading for any marketer entering the social media arena with a major brand.

The fallout from these types of misadventures is that clients become even more skeptical of social media. One client cited this case to me as support that social media just doesn't work for certain brands. I disagree. As Tim Burrowes concluded "In the end, it wasn’t social media that created this disaster for the brand – it was the lack of social media savvy."

So why are great agencies like Saatchi making such spectacular flops? I think a big part of it is they are treating social media like traditional media and missing out entirely on community building which is the real force behind social media. They will never make 15% media commission building a community, and that I believe will keep social media from being taken seriously by many large franchise agency chains for years to come.

Yaris has learned that using social media to push a message out to the market is a risky and costly endeavor. Whether Saatchi will learn that lesson is yet to be seen. In the mean time it will remain up to those independent ad agencies who are well vested in social media to take up the slack. Glad to be of service.

Does the "Starring You" viral video technique still work?

Can your brand benefit from the wildly viral "Staring You Media"?

I am not a fan of Sweden's "voluntary" TV-tax. However, I am a big fan of the campaign they have launched to induce me to pay it. Why? Well, it stars moi (and you too, even if you don't live in Sweden).

I've often said that much of web 2.0 is fueled by the ego and vanity of its users — you and I. If you can harness that energy, you will have an online blockbuster on your hands. Nothing drives that point home better than this breed of viral media that Tech Crunch has dubbed "Starring You" media, or SYM for short.  

I've posted on other SYM in the past including the Obamicon poster craze and Paltalk's "Is it True?" video, as well as OfficeMax's Elf Yourself campaign. Some of you may even remember a SYM version of "It's a Wonderful Life" by JibJab that The Duffy Agency sent out at Christmas a few years back.

Today a client in Denver wrote me to ask how his brand might use this technique. That got me wondering if the SYM prank is played out.

The Swedish tax SYM has taken the genre to a new level. While the idea is certainly borrowed, the quality of its production helps it gloss over the lack of originality (glad to know my TV-tax dollars are producing some form of diversion).

So could your brand benefit from SYM? Yes, but there's a catch. With each new entry the bar is raised. If you do produce such a video or image, it will need to surpass the last SYM your target starred in. It would be better still if they had never seen SYM before, but that demographic is dwindling.

You might also think about integrating your brand message into the plot a little more than the previous examples have managed. I'm not saying that's easy, I'm just saying it's optimal. AMF Pension Fund in Sweden managed this last year with their "age yourself" campaign. If you uploaded a picture of yourself they would send back a image of you at 70 years old. Clever, but it also solved a marketing problem because young people can't imagine they will ever be old and therefore are not interested in thinking about retirement no less saving for it. This campaign made the topic fun, engaging and very personal. 

After three years of everyone I know Elfing themselves, I can say I've grown a bit weary of SYM in general. But as soon as I see myself starring in a new film or poster, those concerns abate. Because of this appeal and their wild ability to go viral, I think we will see increasingly more clever, sophisticated and technologically advanced versions of SYM going forward. In fact, I bet you'll be starring in your own feature-length film before long. Please invite me to the premier. 

Thanks to @karelbabor for sending me the TV-tax film. To kick off the Christmas Season, my next post will be on the story behind Elf Yourself: Lessons for clients and ad agencies alike in the Season of Giving. 

What I learned at Cannes Lions 2009

Big ideas win big at Cannes. Will advertising ever be the same?

The global slowdown in the ad biz took center stage at every talk and seminar this year at Cannes Lions. You could also see it in the smaller number of attendees and their general demeanor. Everything was a bit less grand, a bit less frivolous this year.  Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, spoke to this point reminding us that we are not in a recession but a restart.  He maintains that there are new forces shaping our economy.  He said the faltering we see is simply society  getting used to dealing with them. He made a special note of how they are reshaping the role of ad agencies. 

At the closing ceremony, the organizers of the festival echoed Ballmer’s sentiments and said that this year would be a restart for the Cannes Lions as well. This theme was underscored again in David Lubars’ introduction to the film awards. Lubar, the head of the film jury, said that Cannes winners from now on will have to be more grounded in solid business value for clients. When he announced that “This year you won’t see any scam ads”  he got a round of applause. Scam ads refers to ads that were created for the sole purpose of entering them into award shows. Lubars promised that the winners this year would all reflect real marketing solutions to real marketing problems. I was glad to hear this.  But it begs the questions: Why has work that did not reflect real marketing solutions to real marketing problems been entertained by Cannes juries for the past 55 years? I believe it is because the advertising industry has always been confused over its identity. This year’s Cannes restart seems to have resolved that debate and in doing so has marked a fundamental shift in the way agencies serve their clients.

Agencies pride themselves on their creative prowess. But their definition of “creativity” has always been quite limiting. To most ad agencies creativity refers exclusively to novel combinations of images, copy and sound applied to print, outdoor, radio and TV with virtually no accountability to business results. This is what wins shiny pencils and lions, keeps fragile egos inflated and attracts clients who don’t know how else to judge an agency.  There is nothing wrong with this. Its what makes the world go round. And I have been as guilty as anyone for contributing to it. 

The only flaw in the systems is that quite often the agency’s need for recognition from other agencies seems to eclipse the needs of the client.  When that happens, every client ill is prescribed the same cure: a large dose of whacky creative execution. Toss a tutu on a blue gorilla and have him dance the fox trot with Willem Dafoe in Grand Central Station and BINGO you’ve got a winner! An account director friend refers to this type of advertising as sponsored entertainment.  That’s exactly what it is.  And when these ads win awards the business result for the client is always given short shrift if it is mentioned at all.  I’m not saying you can’t be entertaining and solve real marketing problems at the same time — you can — but as the Cannes judges themselves indicated, it has not been a requirement.  

If the 2009 Cannes Lions are any indication, this era of agency self-indigence seems to coming to a rather abrupt close. I wish I could credit our industry, but it wasn’t us. It was a matter of survival born of three factors: evaporating advertising budgets, an indomitable media environment and omnipresent measurability.

These three forces are changing the fundamental nature of the advertising business — for the better.  Today, agencies are being forced into accountability like it or not. They are being forced to provide real strategic business solutions. And they are being forced to display creativity in every aspect of the business not just with their words and images. These are things agencies have been claiming for decades, but have never really delivered on. 

The most persuasive evidence to support this argument are this years winners at Cannes. The biggest awards of the event, the Titanium and Integrated Lions, went to a campaign that was created without the help of an ad agency at all. It was conceived and created by the slightly geeky, incredibly competent political advisor David Plouffe and a team of volunteers. It had no blue gorilla.  It had no special effects, no amazing imagery, not even a clever headline.  In fact, any one piece of Barack Obama’s campaign on its own could be accurately described as mundane.  But the sum of these pieces was a campaign that was as original, bold and creative as any I’ve ever seen.  This is to say nothing of its historic effectiveness.

The other big winner was a global recruitment ad campaign with a total budget of $1.2 million US. The lack-luster headline on the small black and white classified ad simply read “The Best Job in the World” followed by  a routine job description. What made this extraordinary was that it was a tourism campaign. The job being advertised was a six month stint acting as caretaker on a tropical island in the Great Barrier Reef for $120,000 US. To apply, you just needed to submit a video to YouTube.  As you might imagine news of this job opening spread like wildfire across the internet. 35,000 applicants uploaded 610 hours of YouTube Video. In the first 56 days the  campaign website logged about 7 million unique visitors and 50 million page views with the average visitor staying for 8.62 minutes. Every major news network around the globe covered the story generating over $100,000,000 US in additional free exposure across traditional media as well.  Again, no ape - just a brilliantly creative business idea.

This same type of creativity could be seen in Fiat’s award-winning EcoDrive Campaign in the UK and Nestle’s award-winning Kit Kat Mail campaign in Japan and Haagen-Daz's campaign to save the honey bee. Exceptionally novel, creative and exciting business ideas with nary a shocking visual or rib-splitting headline in sight. And all proven to provide an exceptional return on investment with hard data. Of course they were very well executed, but that was not the source of their power or appeal.

Its not the fist time Cannes judges have awarded "big idea" campaigns like this. But the dominance of this type of campaign at this year’s Cannes Lions signals a tipping point in our industry that raises the bar for ad agencies around the world. These campaigns show a level of maturity, restraint and insight that is new to advertising. Their creativity does not spring from novel use of words and images, but rather springs from novel use of business and market insights. This is not to say execution is not important. Copywriting, art direction and production are still essential elements, its just that they serve a higher purpose beyond disruption and entertainment alone.

Will this trend stick once the economy bounces back? I think it will. Because even if budgets bounce back, agencies and clients still have to adapt to a PULL-driven market where it is increasingly difficult to own the media and where success to avoid the scrutiny of increasingly sophisticated analytics. I applaud this years Cannes Lion juries. Their choices have signaled a change that will benefit both ad agencies and their clients. 

So funny it hurts - the latest ad process parody

In case you ever wondered how bad ads get that way, you may want to check out this film. It's a cross between Truth in Advertising and Nine Ways to Improve an Ad. If there were no stop signs this is how they would be developed by a company and their ad agency.

Will you be at the Cannes Lions 2009?

Well it's June and that mean tines for the annual pilgrimage to the South of France.  If you will be at the Cannes Lions next week let's meet up. I'll be there all week with colleagues from The Duffy Agency and the Transworld Advertising Agency Network (TAAN).

I'll be representing The Duffy Agency if you want to talk agency biz.  I'll also be representing our advertising agency network, TAAN if you want to talk about the group.  And I'll be representing myself in case you'd like to stop talking shop and just have a couple of beers.

Sign-up to meet-up here

Established in New York in 1936, TAAN is a global group of about 50 independent ad agencies from all over the world.  We’re always interested in talking to new agencies who might be interested in applying for membership. If you are from an independent agency please give me a shout.

It seems it will be quieter at Cannes this year compared to years past. Look on the bright side: more room at the Gutter Bar!

Back to Basics

OPENING REMARKS TO THE TAAN 2009 GLOBAL SUMMIT IN COPENHAGEN

I’d like to thank you all for being here for the 2009 TAAN Global summit. I know most of you traveled great distances to join us here in Copenhagen.  You represent agencies and perspectives from five continents, so I’m sure the exchange over the next three days will be fruitful.  

We began planing the program for this meeting last June at the Cannes Lions.  Many of the talks at last year’s ad festival focused on all the changes happening around Web 2.0 and social media. Chuck Porter (Crispin Porter + Bogusky) brilliantly summed up 7 days of lectures in one sentence "Everything is changing and you are so screwed." And this was before the global financial crisis kicked in.

Cannes got us thinking. Is everything really changing? And are we really screwed? 

To the first point, yes, things are changing. The way ad agencies are organized, the skill sets required to service clients, the way we are paid, the media landscape, the number of channels we have to deliver our message, the technology surrounding those channels, the competitors we face and the demands placed upon us by the economy, employees and our clients - all these things are certainly in a state of flux.

No doubt, these issues are important and need to be resolved. But in developing a theme for this meeting we wondered if all this financial crisis and change might not be distracting us from our core business as ad agencies — the reason many of us got involved in advertising and marketing in the first place.

Do you believe new revenue models and web 2.0 alone will save our agencies? Moreover will these factors build the next great ad agency? We don’t think so. In that sense, maybe we are screwed.

At the center of this whirlwind of change we see two constants. They are the core competencies around which all great agencies are built:

• The ability to discover a consumer insight
• The ability to tell a compelling story around it

These are the basics and without them all the Twitter followers, Facebook friends and Google juice in cyberspace won’t be enough to help your agency or the brands you represent.

So we decided that this still point, the basic skills of our craft, would be an apt theme for this meeting. I propose that over the next three days we collectively get back to basics and address these 3 questions:

• How can the basics create a competitive advantage for your agency?
• How can you use the basics in combination with new media, new agency models and new technology to do it?
• How can we as a network use all of the above to increase TAAN’s profile?

As part of that we have instigated the first ever TAAN creative awards called the Titan Awards. We first proposed this four years ago and were met with a lukewarm response. Given that and the short notice we figured we would get about 50 entrees.  We got 420.  And if you look around the room at the short-listed entrees, I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of work your network is producing. So thanks to everyone who participated.  We’ll be having our first ever Titan Award Gala on Saturday evening. And if you haven’t been there yet, I’d encourage you to visit the Titan Award web site. You can link off the www.taan.org site.

So again, on behalf of everyone at The Duffy Agency, thanks for being here and for helping the group get get back to basics over the next three days and beyond.

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