Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [85]
The reason for the desperation had less to do with what was happening in adland on Super Bowl Sunday than with the state of network-TV advertising the other 364 days of the year. Because on those days that don’t feature a Super Bowl, the dynamic is almost completely inverted.
On those days, commercials are not embraced by consumers; they are something to be avoided at all costs. Zapped, TiVoed, and DVRed into oblivion. On those 364 days, many TV programs aren’t watched live. They’re watched whenever the viewer gets around to it, sometimes on a screen smaller than a Post-it note.
So on Super Bowl Sunday, network TV was poised to set an all-time one-day viewership record. But on the following Monday and on every day until the next Super Bowl, it would revert to a ratings tailspin that continues to drop to historic lows. Throw in the 2007 writers’ strike, which just about killed the new network season as well, and it becomes glaringly obvious why brands with a big, timely story to tell gobbled up that Super Bowl time much earlier than usual. They had no choice.
I tried my hypothesis on Tom McGovern, U.S. director of sports media, Optimum Sports, who buys time for the Super Bowl perennial PepsiCo, and he didn’t laugh. “With the uncertainty in prime time, there’s definitely been a trend to advertise with live sports and mega-events. Major brands need major outlets with mass reach to launch new products and campaigns. The Super Bowl is the best and one of the last places to make that kind of splash.”
The promise of a rare large, captive audience is also why there would be more movie trailers (twelve) during the 2007 game than ever before on a Super Bowl broadcast. While trailers aren’t exactly the kinds of commercials that will be passionately discussed the next day around watercoolers or in the blogosphere, they were being so prominently featured this year because of three letters: DVR.
“If you’re a movie opening on a fixed date, you can’t wait seven days for people to look at your trailer,” explained D’Ermilio at Fox Sports, before repeating his hard-to-contest company line: “The Super Bowl is 100 percent DVR-proof.”
Reflection of the Culture or Accidental Zeitgeist?
It is a widely held belief that a consideration of the Super Bowl ads of a given year will accurately reflect the buzz of pop culture if not the zeitgeist of the day. Consider some of the usual suspects: Bud-weiser’s “Lizards” (1997) taking the piss out of the concept of corporate spokespeople (the frogs) by trying to kill them; or Apple’s Orwellian Ridley Scott–directed classic “1984;” or the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy’s series of 2002 spots that ominously linked smoking marijuana to, among other things, terrorism; or perhaps the spot that most accurately reflected the American economic zeitgeist at any given time, the 1999 E*Trade “Dancing Monkey” spot that captured the unbridled enthusiasm of the dotcom era when it proclaimed, “We just wasted $2 million. What are you doing with your money?” A statement that, according to my former colleague Corey Rakowsky, an associate creative director at Young & Rubicam Advertising, “made us feel for the first and perhaps last time ever that money isn’t so serious.”
For the record, money started becoming serious again several weeks after the following year’s Super Bowl, a game in which seventeen dot-com companies advertised, when the Nasdaq began its historic crash.
“Year after year, clients demand that we be as edgy as the Apple ‘1984’ commercial, forgetting that the context of 1984 was much less competitive and demanding of attention,” says Jeff Goodby cochairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. “Super Bowl commercials are an anomaly of communication, and, I must say, I usually discourage clients from attempting them, even though we’ve had a pretty good track record of success [including the Bud lizards and the