• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, January 29, 2014

Well, Rob Siltanen, founder and CCO of LA-based Siltanen & Partners summed up why a Super Bowl commercial is most certainly worth $4 million.  "What other venue better assures that people are going to watch your commercial or talk about your brand more than being on the Super Bowl? What other venue says you’re a first-rate, big-time, trustworthy brand more than the Super Bowl? What other place allows you to catch the eyes of 108 million men and women with one fell swoop? What event can better excite and motivate your internal staff, sales force, or franchise network? What event can better tie-in and harness the power of digital and social media? And what other event better allows your brand and products to be talked about for weeks leading up to the event, during the event, and for weeks, months, and even years after the event?" Feel better all you Super Bowl advertisers?

Two Saatchi & Saatchi New York creatives, Juan Leguizamon (whose name sounds strikingly familiar to that of a certain Hollywood star) and Dave Gordon, are out with a project called Shoot First.  Like the name implies, it's all about getting things done without wasting too much time thinking about it. The project's philosophy is described as “speed is everything when you want to do something that's never been done before.” In a way, it's kind of like that tagline for that really popular sneaker company. Just saying.

What's an agency to do with its spare time and the pent up anger it has experienced due to the overuse of hashtags on social media? If you're Threshold Interactive, you launch an app called Hash Snag which aims to "rid the world of useless, meaningless hashtags by replacing, clarifying or deleting them altogether.” Now that's a project we can get behind! How does it work? Prior to posting to, say, Twitter, you enter your post into the app. If you're use of hashtags passes muster, your post is published. If not, it gets "has snagged" and you receive a digital slap on the wrist for your idiotic over use of hashtags. I'm thinking Twitter or Instagram and Facebook should buy this app right now and integrate it into their services thereby eliminating Stupid Hashtags (yeah, there's a Twitter account that collects stupid hashtags.)

I'm not sure this is a good thing or a bad thing. Over in the UK (and it's probably the same in the U.S.) just 41% of ad agency execs say creative is more important that data when it comes to developing a successful TV campaign. Now, granted, that old idiom "a bad ad in a good medium is better that a good ad in a bad medium" is probably still true but has the rise of big data really taken that big a bite out of the value placed on a big idea and the powerful creative it can lead to? Is there no place left in advertising for bold creative spirit? Will creative go the way of media (think programmatic buying) with creative being cobbled together by machines based on a data feed? Will ad agency creative departments be extinct in 20 years?

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