• by August 18, 2005

BUZZ BOWL -- Over the years, we've been struck by the steadily advancing hype surrounding upcoming ads in the Super Bowl. Now we're noticing some extraordinarily early hype surrounding the hype leading up to the Super Bowl. Of course, they don't call it hype. These days, it's called "buzz," and unlike earlier incarnations of "publicity," "spin," or plan vanilla "media coverage," this new vernacular of marketing communications has evolved into its own ROI metric. Some call it word-of-mouth. Others call it buzz metrics. We call it a classic example of the power of public relations. Taking a sow's earful and turning it into a silk persuasion index. Well good for the PR boys - and girls. It was about time they got their due in the marketing world. They were long overlooked as a strategic marketing asset, relegated to the status of "flaks" and C-suite handlers. The truth is PR was always a science, but it was only used by those public relations executives who thought of themselves as scientists, or at least as marketers.

The availability of data is giving PR new respect in marketing circles, especially at a time when word-of-mouth has become the water cooler talk of the marketing biz. It probably wasn't one single factor. Surely, advertising renegade Al Ries has had something to do with it. His book - "The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR" - as well as his occasional rants in Advertising Age have surely gotten the attention of some influential thinkers.

But more than anything, we think it is the sudden availability of so much rich, instantaneous data about who's saying what about whom. Enter the buzz metrics crowd. Folks like Cymphony, Intelliseek, and of course, Buzz Metrics - companies that are harassing public conversations about companies, people, brands, issues and products, as a new form of market soothsaying. The problem is they're only monitoring public conversations - things that appear online, in blogs, on message board, discussion groups, and opinion sites that are more likely to tell you what the vocal minority think than the silent majority. Heck they're not even measuring apples and oranges. They're merely measuring the low-hanging fruit.

What does all this have to do with the Super Bowl? Aside from becoming the consummate PR event for Madison Avenue, ads running in the Big Game have now become the market research, according to Pete Blackshaw, the chief marketing, not to mention the chief satisfaction officer of ad buzz tracker Intelliseek, who pointed out this morning that even as the NFL's pre-season spin gets underway, marketers are beginning to make decisions about whether to shell out upwards of $3 million for commercials in the 2006 Super Bowl.

Will their pricey ads generate buzz around the water cooler, he asks? If thousands of highly attentive bloggers ignore or badmouth an ad, will sponsors get their money's worth? Of course, it's Blackshaw's business to raise those questions, but we've really got to wonder if we've reached the point where sophisticated marketers like PepsiCo or Anheuser-Busch are going to sit around wringing their hands over blog entries about their ads.

As far as we're concerned the Super Bowl is still just a game and a great, highly rated TV advertising event. As for the "buzz bowl," well that's what happens to the Bud Bowl, after we've had one too many Buds.