Sunday, February 3, 2013

It's Super Bowl Ad Sunday!

Super Bowl Sunday--the bacchanalian feast of food, football and...advertising.  I'm not sure when the first advertising person thought, "hmm, there are a lot of eyeballs watching this game on TV," and thus considered the brand benefits of launching a product or key message on the game telecast.  We now know, of course, that the advertising is, for many, as big a draw as the game itself, tracked by AdMeter and numerous pundits who opine on who "won" the Super Bowl ad wars.

I've personally lived through those ad wars on three different occasions where my company was an advertiser.  And, I was intimately involved in the determination of our message and the creation of the commercial which would cost millions of dollars, not only for the media time but for the development and production as well.

The creative process, at any time, is one where the line between great and mundane is very, very thin.  When it comes to Super Bowl advertising, that line becomes razor-thin.  Creative legacies are built on spots that resonate and become a part of popular culture.  Brands are derided for spots that fall flat, failing to capture the public's imagination and thus risking being thought of, by management and critics, as wasted media dollars.

What's the best Super Bowl spot ever?  It depends--if you ask an ad-type, you'll automatically get "1984," the Orwellian spot from Apple that launched the brand mystique of that company; if it's a consumer, aged 45+, you'll likely get the Mean Joe Green commercial for Coke as the response.  One tugged at the consumer's heartstrings, the other tried to portray the vision of a brand where "think differently" became much more than a corporate slogan.

Which spot will win on today's telecast?  Maybe it'll be Audi and the Venables Bell spot, featuring a bookish teenager who goes to the prom solo, but gets a heavy dose of swag by getting to drive his Pops S6.  If it's a tearjerker spot you want, stay tuned for Budweiser's Clydesdale spot where the trainer of the horse reunites with the adult animal.

I'll be tweeting about my take on the Super Bowl advertising, on behalf of Premier Sports, at @PremierKC.  Follow us on Twitter and let me know what you think--advertising game on!


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