Superbowl-ads.com Article Archive

BY DAVID THOMAS
dthomas@star-telegram.com

Super Bowl XLV is 200 days away. The first NFL teams have yet to report for training camps. There are teams, however, already developing their Super Bowl game plans: the companies that will push their products and services from the stage of the world’s largest single-day sporting event.

Companies have thrived and nose-dived based [...]

“A whole cottage industry has grown up out of trying to make use of network turndowns,” said Martin Franks, executive vice president of planning, policy and government affairs at CBS Corp, which is televising the NFL game this year. “It can happen in the middle of July, but obviously this is a wonderfully high-profile opportunity.”

The commercial approval process has come under heavy scrutiny this year since CBS approved an ad sponsored by a conservative Christian group called Focus on the Family. Some U.S. women’s groups have urged the network not to air the ad — which stars college football star Tim Tebow — saying it has a strident anti-abortion rights message.

Industry executives and analysts recognize Internet domain company GoDaddy.com, which annually airs several ads during the Super Bowl as the best at attracting attention for its ads. On Thursday, GoDaddy in a press release invited consumers to view its latest rejected ad at the company website.

“GoDaddy was one of the first advertisers who set out to capitalize on the fact that ads get rejected and that there’s a PR opportunity in that,” said Tim Calkins, marketing professor with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. GoDaddy is one of the PR masters of the Super Bowl.”

Other companies that have had ads rejected as inappropriate this year include online jobs site CareerBuilder.com and gay male dating site Mancrunch.com. Last year, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) garnered the spotlight for an ad General Electric’s NBC rejected.

Don Rickles, also known as “Mr. Warmth,” returns to the small screen as the voice of the sarcastically witty and wilted flowers-in-a-box in Teleflora’s new commercial set to debut during Super Bowl XLIV, on CBS Sunday, February 7, 2010.

“We are thrilled to have someone of Don Rickles’ stature be part of our new spot. Rickles, who is known for his off-beat humor, is the perfect choice to voice our sarcastic flowers,” said Shawn Weidmann, President, Teleflora. “With Valentine’s Day — one of the busiest flower buying days right around the corner — we knew that being part of the game’s advertising line-up offers us the chance to reach 150 million potential customers.”

The commercial will continue to air through Friday, February 12, 2010 on sports focused cable channels and primetime cable shows geared towards male viewers. Teleflora also will conduct home page takeovers on sports enthused sites the week of February 12, with banner ads across several top providers directly linking users to a landing page that offers click-to-call for easy ordering.

Teleflora is extending the creative contradiction of flowers-in-a-box vs. its hand-arranged bouquets online in a “naughty vs. nice” viral execution of the commercial campaign. In the “nice” execution, consumers can send someone a sincere message along with a beautiful, virtual Teleflora bouquet. In the “naughty” execution, the spirit of the talking flowers comes alive with consumer-generated or pre-selected sarcastic messages that are “delivered” with un-arranged, uncut, sloppily packed flowers in a box. With each “naughty or nice” e-card, Teleflora is offering the sender and recipient a discount code from telelfora.com. For more information, customers can log onto www.teleflora.com.

The company’s in-house ad agency, Fire Station, was behind the concept and creation of the hilarious new spot. The spot was produced by Go Film and directed by Tim Hamilton.

For one brief cultural moment, little-known start-ups, often based on business plans flimsier than a Brett Favre retirement announcement but inexplicably flush with venture capital, occupied the most valuable advertising space in the history of the world. Super Bowl XXXIV, pitting the Tennessee Titans against the St. Louis Rams on January 31, 2000, was going to be their moment to break through to consumers and vault to the heights of the new e-commerce economy.

With the benefit of 10 years of hindsight, of course, it represents the moment when these companies had reached their frothy pinnacle. Most of the more than a dozen dot-coms that paid more than $2 million for 30-second Super Bowl ads – such as Computer.com, Epidemic.com and OurBeginning.com – failed to catch on, and Pets.com became the Poster Sock-Puppet of empty Silicon Valley hype.

Ten years down the road, most venture-backed companies are more concerned with keeping costs down and proving they can actually make money than they are in blowing wads of investor cash on TV commercials. One exception is massively funded vacation rental service HomeAway.com, which is using the upcoming Super Bowl XLIV to show its first national ad and launch a yearlong campaign centered on Chevy Chase and the rest of the fictional Griswold family of “National Lampoon’s Vacation” movie fame.

“Consumer awareness of vacation rentals is still low, even though it’s one of the fastest growing segments of online travel,” says Brian Sharples, founder and chief executive officer of HomeAway, in a statement announcing the ad. “We’re going to use the Super Bowl broadcast to launch an exciting campaign highlighting the benefits of vacation rentals to reach more than 100 million people.”

kgb, creator of America’s most successful text answer service, 542542 (kgbkgb), announced today that it will run its first-ever Super Bowl ad during the Big Game on February 7th. kgb, which launched its text answering service in the US just a year ago, will run a 30-second spot during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIV. More details about the commercial will be released next week.

kgb’s Super Bowl spot was created by ad agency The Brooklyn Brothers in New York City and produced by House of Usher Films in Santa Monica, California. The ad will highlight kgb’s 542542 text answer service as a better way to get quick, precise information by texting questions to live kgb “Special Agents” instead of having to sift through mountains of results that a search engine typically returns when asked a specific question.

As Super Bowl XLIV nears on Feb. 7, CBS is already “very close to a sellout,” a spokesman for the network, Dana McClintock, said on Tuesday. He declined to specify how much of the estimated 30 to 35 minutes of paid commercial time in the game was still available.

By contrast, at this point in 2009, when NBC was selling spots to be shown during the broadcast of Super Bowl XLIII on Feb. 1, considerably more time remained unsold.

“Last year, time was being sold entering into a recession,” Mr. McClintock said. “This year, it’s being sold apparently coming out of one.”

Another difference is that a year ago, many marketers that bought Super Bowl spots were playing down their participation, fearing that the sour national mood made the usual hoopla seem inappropriate. Now, though, the hyperbole machine is being cranked up by many sponsors as they seek attention for their ad plans.

“You’re never going to see us on Super Bowl,” Mazda North American chief Jim O’Sullivan said at the Detroit auto show. “We’re not going to spend that kind of money on that kind of property because, yeah, you get a lot of impressions and stuff out there, but the fact of the matter is, do you really get to the target you really wanted? That’s more of a feel-good ad for a lot of people.” “The one thing about the Super Bowl too, if you’re going to go and do ads at the Super Bowl, you better make sure you got some very good creative because you’ll get criticized for your ads if you don’t have very strong creative,” he said. “So is it about selling cars or is this an agency’s competition? They’re memorable in some cases, but that’s a very expensive property.” “I’d rather take those resources and go where our customers are and focus on what our brand is,” O’Sullivan added.

The ranks of Super Bowl advertisers are changing. Once, mass marketers saw intuitive sense in getting in front of a mass audience–which the Super Bowl provides like no other television event.

Who’s better off laying out the nine figures for the Super Bowl? Mainly those companies whose brand images are still developing, where the goal is to shape opinion or change public perceptions.

Hyundai, which will advertise this year, is trying to expand past an image as a maker of small, cheap cars. Go Daddy, the Internet domain registrar that markets aggressively through racy ads, some featuring racecar driver Danica Patrick, got over 5 million hits on its Web site following last year’s Super Bowl ads. Career Builder has a natural fit this year thanks to a bum economy that’s got more people looking for job search help. And online broker E-Trade, increasingly established but still focused on luring customers from traditional brokerages, is back in the Super Bowl for a fifth year.

truTV will be part of the ad lineup for CBS’s broadcast of the Super Bowl. truTV’s first Super Bowl ad will feature one of the NFL’s most popular players, Troy Polamalu of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The network’s Super Bowl spot will highlight an addition to truTV’s lineup: NFL FULL CONTACT, a behind-the-scenes look at professional football. The ad is scheduled to appear in the second quarter of the game, prior to the two-minute warning.

truTV’s Super Bowl spot is being created by Grey, a renowned New York agency. Grey’s recent Super Bowl work includes iconic spots for ETrade.

Dr Pepper, the oldest major soft drink in the U.S., is teaming up with legendary rockers KISS as a first-time advertiser during Super Bowl XLIV. The ad will air in the second quarter of the big game and feature Gene Simmons returning as “Dr. Love” in the next evolution of the brand’s “Trust Me, I’m a Dr” campaign. Paul Stanley and the entire KISS lineup will join Simmons to describe Dr Pepper Cherry’s uniquely smooth taste – achieved with a “kiss” of cherry flavor.

Throughout its 125-year history, Dr Pepper has created some of the most iconic ad campaigns in America, including “I’m a Pepper,” “Be You” and “Just What the Doctor Ordered.” AOL.com ranked the 1970s’ “I’m a Pepper” ad among the “10 Commercial Jingles We Can’t Forget.” The new ad is just one element of Dr Pepper’s year-long celebration of its 125th Anniversary which kicks off Jan. 25, 2010.