• by Paul Gough , May 6, 2003

Think Super Bowl. Marketers must use a blend of entertainment and information to reach today's disconnected consumer.

That was the message from Tom Cotton, president of DDB Integrated Solutions Group, outlined the approach during a Tuesday afternoon presentation to The Yankee Group's Connected Consumer Summit, which wrapped up after two days. He said that people in the industry who are predicting that TiVo and interactive TV will end commercials haven't got it right if innovation is applied.

"You can build it so that it's the other way around," he said. As examples, Cotton discussed two initiatives that made big splashes in recent years. The "Whassup?" campaign for Anheuser-Busch and the Terry Tate, Office Linebacker campaign that ran during the Super Bowl.

The Whassup? campaign started with an idea from a New York filmmaker and expanded into a larger concept thanks to work from an ad agency team that realized it was "the essence of the essence of men, beer and Bud," Cotton said. The commercials were aired with a strong tie to the Internet site, and the campaign took on a life of its own through consumer interaction and viral marketing. "People started creating their own Whassup? commercials," he said, including one that used the A-B soundtrack with cartoon superheroes like Superman, Batman and Robin, and Wonder Woman.

Similar was the buzz generated by the Terry Tate spot, Reebok's first entry into the Super Bowl advertising market in recent years. It was this year's highest-rated Super Bowl spot in recall and downloads. Cotton said that there's a lesson from that spot in this digital age: Quality counts.

"Even in the old traditional world, even without the Web, it's a great spot," Cotton said. The elements of involvement and relevancy make it the right message at the right time, he said. And when advertisers are finding it harder and harder to reach consumers, it's more important than ever to make great TV spots, he said.

This realization of today's Brave New World has been "a bucket of water for my industry . People aren't exactly hanging on every bubbly denture demo," Cotton said. Instead, it's becoming all about building significant brand experiences by building marketing content.

"This is what our content has to be," Cotton said of the examples. "We have to build marketing content, not noise, more of what people want to see." In the case of the Terry Tate spots, the goal was to drive consumers to Reebok's Internet site. "It wasn't just to make us laugh. It was really about the Web," Cotton said.

And the beauty of interactive applications is that it's completely trackable, unlike other forms of media, including non-interactive-enabled TV. The Terry Tate site had 11 million film views - equivalent to 66 years of streaming - 5 million site visitors and, most significantly for the client, 700,000 registrants who told Reebok information about themselves. The buzz included appearances on TV, including The Today Show, and Tate even cut the ribbon on last month's Boston Marathon.

"A huge success," Cotton said. "It's not content. It's marketing content, something that people welcome, have fun with."

David Zaslov, president of NBC Cable, said in a later presentation that there's a hesitancy about interactive television advertising following the dot-com bust and past experiences with interactive TV. "There's the 'I-Don't-Want-To-Look-Stupid' Factor," Zaslov said. "There's a lot out there that's smoke and there's a lot that's meaningful." He said that both advertisers and media companies are going slow, chastened by bad online experiences.

"We're all a little gunshy and I think it will hold up the deployment" of interactive TV advertising, Zaslov said.