University of Delaware professor John Antil had a lot of reasons to be disappointed Sunday night. First, he watched former U Del quarterback Rich Gannon get treated like a rag doll by the Buccaneers. Then his disappointment as a professor of advertising and marketing set in. “Overall,” he said. “I was just really disappointed.” That seemed to be a frequently echoed sentiment in many academic and consulting quarters after the Super Bowl. The Raiders couldn’t make it a game and the advertising showcase didn’t make it much better. Antil says most ads failed his criteria of attention, buzz and branding. Only a few brands, he said, managed to score well. “This may surprise you,” Antil said. “But I think Cadillac did a great job. They wanted to address the lowering age of their typical buyer. They ran a 60 second spot that worked perfectly. And they wanted to change their image. You have to do something different in the Super Bowl. In fact, maybe that’s all you can do. But in being different you still must entertain and communicate the brand.” Antil also credited some of the Anheuser-Busch ads and the Pepsi Twist spot with communicating a coherent brand message. Marc Schiller, CEO of Electric Artists approaches marketing from a less practical point of view. As one of the pioneers of “buzz marketing” he has created street level campaigns for many packaged goods companies, record labels and movie studios. He found several ads to be way off the mark. He found two bright spots, based on his criteria of “what you talk about after the game.” “Reebok’s Terry Tate spots worked on that level,” he said. “Whether it sells any shows remains to be seen. But when you look at some of the other ads. They’re clearly not what you talk about the next day. The Bud Clydesdale ads are beautifully shot, but you don’t talk about them later. A lot depends on how these companies follow up.” Both Antil and Schiller both agreed that follow up was critical for the campaigns that launched at the Super Bowl. Schiller said the many action/adventure films that debuted during the game used the mass-market platform well. But reminding the consumer at showtime will be a different challenge.
Gwen Stefani and her band, No Doubt, made one of the most-watched plays of Super Bowl Sunday according to TiVo viewers. The digital video recording service announced the results of its own Super Bowl polling, tracking both viewership and advertising. In a news conference Monday afternoon, TiVo executives said about 48% of subscribers watched the Super Bowl. TiVO SVP/General Manager Brodie Keast said the big winner – beyond Tampa Bay – was fictional character Office Linebacker Taylor Tate. The Reebok spot was the most-watched among TiVo viewers. Four of the remaining five most-watched commercials came from Anheuser-Busch, which again this year was the Super Bowl’s top advertiser. “Viewers watch the content that they find most compelling, even when the most compelling content is the commercials,” Keast said. The game’s top play, according to 10,000 randomly selected TiVo viewers, was Dwight Smith’s 44-yard return following an interception. Viewership dropped off significantly during halftime game analysis but spiked upward with the halftime entertainment, which included a performance by No Doubt. A key TiVo feature, the Trickplay that allows the pausing, rewinding and fast forwarding of live broadcasts, was accessed an average of 40 times per TiVo household during the game. “TiVo viewers have a much different experience in the Super Bowl … Viewers made their own decisions [on what to watch and review],” Keast said. A real-time interactive advertising ranking system developed by McKee Wallwork Henderson Advertising gave top honors to the “Castaway” commercial created by Fed Ex. Adbowl received more than 167,000 votes through wireless phones and on the Adbowl.com website during the game. In addition to the Fed Ex box, the top five spots as ranked by Adbowl were Budweiser “Clydesdales Replay,” Reebok “Terry Tate Office Linebacker,” Bud Light “Dreadlock Dog” and Sierra Mist “Monkey Catapult.” The commercial least liked by viewers participating in Adbowl during the Super Bowl was the Sierra cash Back advertisement created by GMC. USA Today’s Web site poll of favorite and least-favorite spots garnered 20,000 votes by mid-afternoon Monday, less than 24 hours after the game started. It, too, ranked Reebok’s Terry Tate ad as tops with 4,531 votes or 21%. Anheuser-Busch’s Instant Replay spot, featuring a zebra and Clydesdales, was in second place with 4,387 votes or 20% of the total. Also receiving votes were Anheuser-Busch’s Clown Suit, Pepsi Twist’s Osbournes meet the Osmonds, and FedEx’s Desert Island Castaway takeoff. Least favorite, according to USA Today voters? Levi’s Stampede – 1,339 votes, or 13% of the total – Subway Jared’s Dream and Chrysler’s Celine Dion spot. The Pepsi Twist ad featuring the Osbournes garnered 585 “least favorite” votes as well, putting it in fifth place on that list, too. According to overnight statistics available Monday afternoon, Super Bowl XXVII delivered a 43.8 rating and 62 share, up 3% from last year’s 42.5/61 on Fox. Sunday night’s game was the second most-watched Super Bowl in history with 137.65 million viewing at least some of the game between 6:30 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. The average audience was 88.64 million viewers, the largest average audience for the Super Bowl since 1998, ABC said. Ratings among adults 18-49 was 36.4 and among adults 18-34 it was an 34.2. That far outweighed anything else on TV that night, including new programs on NBC. The Saturday Night Live Weekend Update Halftime Special received about a 3.5 rating/5 share among metered market households when it aired between 8:04 p.m. and 8:34 p.m. NBC said the national numbers were unreliable since it aired live across every time zone. Dateline, which was listed as first-run, did a 3.5/5 in metered market households and in preliminary nationals, did a 1.6/3 among adults 18-49 and 5 million viewers overall.
Tallulah Bankhead once said, “it doesn’t matter what they say about you, as long as they spell your name right.” I suppose that was true back in the days when what they said about you wasn’t the lead joke in Letterman’s or Leno’s opening monologue. Or before the opinions of media (and non-media) pundits were beamed worldwide via satellite. You know, before web sites. What got me thinking about this was the Super Bowl. Not the game itself, which generates an enormous audience, but the commercials that appear during the game. Not only does the Super Bowl generate enormous reach, but also it’s an advertising vehicle that offers advertisers and their agencies the chance to show off their skills – or, as often happens, their lack thereof. (There are presumably viewers who tape the event just to be able to zap the game and cheer or boo the commercials.) At $2+ million for a 30-second spot you wonder why advertisers would pay for the privilege of having their commercials rated, assessed, dissed, dissected and generally re-examined. Which is exactly what happens during the week following the game. Everyone becomes an advertising guru and comments upon the game; I mean, the spots. Those of us who really are in advertising are not immune. Logging on to my computer this morning, my Home Page invited me to rate my “favorite” commercial. What I liked isn’t important, but based on nearly 50,000 other respondents, the Budweiser “Zebra” commercial received a 22% vote. Terry Tate “Office Linebacker” was rated second, with 18% of the vote. I might have voted for that commercial, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was advertising, or for whom. The Osmonds – the Osmonds? – appeared for Pepsi Twist and received 12% of the kudos. The stratospherically compensated Michael Jordan showed up in two campaigns, both very low rated: Gatorade received a mere 3% of the vote. His other was Hanes tagless tee shirts, where Jordan smirks and rolls his eyes as Jackie Chan scratches at the tag rubbing his neck. I guess there are lots of folks who, like me, don’t find tags all that annoying; at least not annoying enough to think a company would base a “brand differentiation strategy” on such a minor attribute – and lay out all that money to promote it. But there I go again, being rational. Besides paying to boost sales, all those Super Bowl advertisers also paid for the joy of having me – and thousands like me – spend the next few days criticizing their commercials, their strategies and their brands. In an economy when every advertising dollar counts, it makes you wonder about the wisdom of this kind of marketing. That said, I suppose those companies might find solace in the age-old quote from Mae West: “It’s better to be looked over than overlooked.” But isn’t that to presume that the spots are, in fact, being looked over? There’s no guarantee that your Super Bowl spot won’t run during bathroom breaks, or while millions scoot out to the kitchen for another cold one – which may or may not be the beer that’s spending all those millions to be “looked over.” The spooky reality is that each year, Super Bowl post-buy analyses reveal a disturbing fact: major advertisers’ spots are indeed recalled – including many advertisers who did not actually run spots! Worse yet, advertisers who poured huge treasure into Super Bowl spots are not recalled, not even as “aided recall.” But, hey, as they say in show biz, “You pays your money, you takes your chances.” It’s just that Super Bowl advertising means paying a huge amount of money – on a very chancy chance. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if they spelled your name right if nobody remembers seeing it. Robert Passikoff is founder of Brand Keys Inc. (New York), a brand and customer loyalty consultancy. He can be reached at 212-532-6028, x12, or robertp@brandkeys.com.