This Sunday, millions will tune in to one of the most significant sporting events in the world and watch both the game and the ads.
The advertising but is the anomaly because, for the other 364 days of the year, people try their best to avoid ads.
That’s because the things they watch and look at have skip buttons and ad blockers, or if they are watching Netflix (as over 60 million Americans do), they have zero ads, and as founder Reed Hastings recently explained, they never will have.
“We want to be the safe respite where you can explore; you can get stimulated, have fun and enjoy – and have none of the controversy around exploiting users with advertising,”
Not so long ago, there was much less of a gap between the ads one could see on the Super Bowl and the advertisements on network and cable television, but that is no longer the case.
The most creative ads that ran outside of the Super Bowl were usually from brand campaigns that companies invested in to promote a new product or service or to change and shift perceptions. Apple’s Think Different being one of the most iconic examples.
Today, the brand campaign seems to have gone the way of the dodo or the last tree on Easter Island. Hard to find and practically extinct. In their place programmatic digital and the short-term one off-brand stunt.
The brand stunt appears to have replaced the brand campaign.
The leading proponent and practitioner being Burger King, who under the marketing leadership of Fernando Machado, has turned them into something that combines the best of art, science, and technology.
What makes Burger King unique and the leader in the new world of stunt/viral brand communication is the fact they have serialized it and turned it something that can impact brand perception in the long-term.
The problem is everyone else is way behind with agencies fighting to get their exciting ideas for short-term efforts sold and funded. We now have a catalog of these cases, which generated Facebook likes and YouTube views, and the very best ones picked up awards at the most prestigious creative award shows.
The problem is that according to research from Peter Field- these short-term efforts don’t impact the brand. They might cause a nice short-term sales spike, but sales quickly return to normal, and the brand impact is often negligible.
What Field argues is that brands need to commit to communicating for the long-term because it takes time for new news to sink in and for long-seared perceptions to change.
This year’s Super Bowl costs advertisers considerable sums in media and production costs, and many go for it because it offers the rare chance to reach the whole of America. This year the majority of efforts will not be part of long-term brand efforts; they will be one-offs hoping for that short-term spike.
While the Super Bowl is the showcase for some of the most creative advertising, most of it is still only working short-term and not part of long-term brand building.
Marketers are passionate about data and rightly so, but they need to use data appropriately and use it to examine in detail the stare of their brand’s health. Given that these are valuable intangible assets, they should be nurtured, protected, and measured.
Without proper measurement of the health of your brand, you have incomplete insight into the impact of your efforts, sales are a critical measure, and if you can manage to isolate the effect of your communication on sakes that is the gold standard.
However, it would be wise for marketers and their agencies to double-down and go deep on their brand measurement. If they were to do this, many would find that they are probably not in such a healthy state.
If the world of advertising becomes programmatic digital made by machines and one off-brand stunts - brands will suffer.
There needs a renewed interest and respect for the power of creativity to transform brands and businesses.
Machines don’t have it, and at best, they seem to be good at creating bland wallpaper that gets ignored- yes, some of the short time ideas often have it in spades, but for reasons previously explained, they don’t do brands many favors.
We need to recognize the power of big ideas based on human truths and ownable insights that have endurance. This year’s SuperBowl has one shining example in Snicker’s work.
The idea that has been around for decades has run in many different countries and many various forms. No CMO has got bored of the effort or decided to abandon it because of not invented here syndrome, and the agency BBDO has not recommended that its client Mars scraps it because BBDO creatives are bored and want to do something else. This campaign has run and run and powered the Snickers brand to incredible commercial success.
When you watch the Super Bowl this Sunday, look out for Snickers and think about how your brand or the brands you work in could try and emulate their approach- not the single ad- but the decades of work all falling under a big powerful, consistent idea.
I leave the final word to Fernando Machado.
I like to work surrounded by people who not only understand the brand but who are also very ambitious when it comes to creativity. That’s certainly true of our agency partners and our local teams. I have been lucky to create an ecosystem of organizations and people that believe that creativity can lead you to deliver a better result – a better business result and a better brand result.