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Annual Competition For Hawking Wares During Most-Watched TV Show

By Melissa McNamara

Cartoonish violence ruled the day at the annual knockdown competition among advertisers Sunday, as Bud Light, Diet Pepsi, Michelob and Sprint all used physical gags to hawk their wares at the Super Bowl, the most-watched television broadcast of the year.

Borrowing inspiration from Buster Keaton, advertisers used mauling bears, flying dinosaurs and even action movie star Jackie Chan to wow viewers with sight gags.

Others went against the grain, such as soap brand Dove, which sent a tender message about self-esteem among teenage girls, and Toyota, which celebrated a bilingual father and son who switch easily between Spanish and English.

“Every year people wait to be knocked out of their socks,” Barbara Lippert from Adweek Magazine tells CBS’ The Early Show. But Lippert says she thought the commercials this year “were a bit weak.”

In a spot that was reminiscent of the classic short film “Bambi Meets Godzilla,” a hapless caveman is squished under the foot of a giant dinosaur, a final insult after being fired for not using FedEx to deliver an important parcel. Never mind that FedEx hasn’t been invented yet.

Michelob Ultra Amber harkened back to a classic Super Bowl spot featuring Terry Tate as an “office linebacker.” A game of touch football goes awry when a petite female player is floored by a vicious tackle, but she gets her due later in a bar with a decidedly late hit.

Bruce Vanden Bergh, professor of advertising at Michigan State University, spent Super Bowl Sunday with more than a dozen other faculty watching and rating the commercials while ignoring the football part of the broadcast entirely. One of the standouts for his group was the FedEx spot featuring the caveman, which they found “very creative, and very original.”

Bud Light, one of the biggest heavyweights of the Super Bowl every year, had an interesting multi-part ad featuring a guy who cleverly disguises his fridge stocked with beer from his thirsty friends with a secret revolving door that places the fridge in his neighbors’ apartment. Hilarity ensues when the neighboring kids start worshipping the “magic fridge.”

Diet Pepsi got into the act as well with a stunt movie gag starring Jackie Chan and a can of Diet Pepsi. Everything seems to be going fine with the movie shoot until Diet Pepsi’s stunt double, a hapless can of rival Diet Coke, is squashed.

Sprint, meanwhile, scored laughs with a goofy spot featuring a guy in a locker room who touts the “crime deterrent” ability of his mobile phone, by hurling straight at the head of another guy after tempting him to try to steal his wallet.

A spot for Dove soap also resonated with viewers, sending a serious message about improving self-esteem among teenage girls, not the usual Super Bowl fare.

“It’s very sweet and it’s very innocent,” Lippert tells The Early Show . “And it’s an ad that’s beautifully photographed with these little girls just looking straight at the camera. You’re gonna have to take 45 seconds out to think about little girls and their self-esteem.”

That spot was a favorite among a group of 35 business students at the Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Ill. Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at the school who organized the panel to rate and discuss the ads, said his group found the Dove ad the “most distinctive” of the ones they saw.

“It was unusual, but one that really resonated,” Calkins said. “This was a message that was very serious, but it really worked with the panel.”

abcnews.go.com

From the Raunchy to the Poignant – Advertisers Ran the Gamut

Commercials that air during the Super Bowl generate as much, if not more buzz than the game itself. But breaking through that buzz and selling the product is a challenge for advertisers. Sometimes the product can get lost in the entertainment.

“People are getting so much buzz before and after that you’re really getting more than you spend,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, CEO and founder of Kaplan Thaler Group. “I’ve never seen so much buzz on the ads beforehand. Now you can download ads on your cell phone. You’ve got viral marketing.”

But comedian Hal Sparks knew what he liked — the streaking lamb Budweiser commercial.

“I think the streaking goat was the funniest on its own,” said Sparks, the former host of E!’s “Talk Soup.”

“Bud got to see their Clydesdales in their continuing ‘Bud Light is for Idiots’ campaign. The Tostitos ad was the same thing. If you ever see a guy drinking Bud and eating Tostitos, don’t let him date your sister.”

This year, a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl cost advertisers $2.5 million. Kaplan Thaler said that somewhere between 90 million and 130 million people were watching and that the Super Bowl was one of the only times when people actually paid attention to the ads.

Some of these advertisers seized the moment, Kaplan Thaler said. She liked Bud’s magic fridge commercial, but was touched by Dove’s commercial about girls and self-esteem.

“It’s interesting to see Unilever/Dove doing a commercial about young girls. You don’t think that’s the typical audience, but half the audience is women,” she said.

Sparks said the Dove ad was a “nice thought” and “kind of cool.”

“Its counterpoint was the here’s-to-beer.com ad,” he said. “Beer is the only thing that holds the world together. Beer is our only point of tradition. It’s the only coming-of-age maker.”

Sparks was also shocked by the Budweiser ad featuring a young Clydesdale who wanted to drive the iconic Bud sleigh.

“Give your kid their first drink,” he said the ad was telling people. “And & let him drive.”

There were also many ads for products geared to older people. For example, Leonard Nimoy touted Aleve.

“That just shows the aging of America,” Kaplan Thaler said. “As we get older, it’s harder to get up and leave when the ads come on — more captive audience.”

But according to Sparks, there were only two commercials that were compelling enough to get him to buy the product.

“That was the Moto PEBL ad, which was very cool, elegant,” he said. “Smart special effects — sexiest ad. I also like the Gillette Fusion ad. But the Gillette Fusion was way too serious. It’s a razor called Fusion, not cold fusion, dudes. Lighten up. But six blades? That’ll shave your hair down to the bone.”

Kaplan Thaler said that the Jessica Simpson Pizza Hut ad was the worst ad.

“Many were not that good,” she said. “Diet Pepsi was bad. Careerbuilder, not enough with the Monkeys. GoDaddy.com was horrible.”

href=”http://www.zagstudios.com/superbowl_xl_tv_commercials.html”>zagstudios.comWinning comedy and nauseating excess.

The overall winner in this year’s Super Bowl ads had to be Anheuser-Busch with at least five good spots. Almost all the Bud Light commercials featured comedy, and regular Budweiser — with its beautifully shot Clydesdales — had several touchdowns, scoring points in both the humor and tasteful nostalgia categories.

Both the revolving wall/Magic Fridge spot and the guys hanging out on the rooftop supposedly “fixing things” while they drink Bud Light with their Buds had great “dude” appeal.

The continuation of the Clydesdales playing football with the spin of the naked sheep streaker used light comedy to great effect. A-B later tapped into those same glorious, hallowed Clydesdales with an earnest, ambitious colt who wants to pull the famous red wagon. Huge horses made elegant and gorgeous cinematography lend a sense of quality, yet pours a light frothy head on top when the farmer onlooker says, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Career Builder scores again this year with two great spots — another “I work with a bunch of monkeys” deal — but this time, the guy’s comment is countered with “I totally understand, I work with a bunch of Jackasses.” It’s a funny, simple “we understand your pain” spot followed by the persuasive and simple tagline, “A better job awaits.”

Their other spot features an office party with everyone celebrating around a sales chart and the boss chimp lighting a cigar with burning money. When the guy points out that the chart is upside down, no one wants to hear it and the boss gets his way again. If it wasn’t a classic rule of advertising before, it should be now: you can’t go wrong with monkeys in business attire. Simple, funny. Again.

Using no special effects to great effect, Sierra Mist scored big with a single spot that ran early in the game. Using a scenario everyone can relate to, an airport security guard attempts to confiscate a bottle of Sierra Mist. When she asks, “What’s this?” the camera zooms tight for a perfectly natural product shot: “Sierra Mist.” He calls her on the fake wand noises and only when threatened with the snap of a latex glove does he relinquish his soda. This spot is so good, we’re actually tempted to check out www.Mist-takes.com after the game.

Using special effects to great effect, Fed Ex creates a funny and effective spot for reliable package delivery. What begins looking like a Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings film takes a funny turn when a pterodactyl message carrier is immediately gobbled up by a T-Rex. In the vein of another downtrodden employee in an unfair workplace (a la the Career Builder spots), he drags in to give his boss the bad news and is fired on the spot for not using Fed Ex — even though it doesn’t exist yet. On his way out of the cave, he kicks a doggie dinosaur and is immediately stomped by the same T-Rex (reminiscent of the Bambi vs. Godzilla prehistoric slapstick). In turn, grand, goofy, and funny, the Fed Ex message resounds: Next time, use Fed Ex.

An excellent spot that breaks out of the standard Super Bowl ad mold is for Dove, a company that’s purposely chosen to break the “always-use-skinny-models” mold. Using the familiar and affecting lyrics from the Cyndi Lauper song “True Colors,” we see a series of shots of young women of all colors and shapes juxtaposed with phrases such as “Thinks she’s fat,” and “hates her freckles” followed by “we’re working to change that.” Dove has begun a “Self-esteem fund” because “They all should feel beautiful how they are.” Very sweet, and in light of all the Dove “fat models” controversy, perfect.

On the other end of the spectrum, Burger King takes the crown. At the top of the list of the bottom of the barrel, Burger King, after an 11-year hiatus, proves that they should have taken 12.

Produced in a Busby Berkley style gone berserk, this spot has all the ingredients to ruin anyone’s appetite. The “Have it Your Way Burgerettes” demonstrate that you can indeed make beautiful models both disgusting and annoying. Women dressed as fried meat and sandwich toppings tumble gracelessly on to one another to form a hamburger only King Kong could choke down. WTF? Ask the Freaky King.

This year’s Super Bowl features another study in excess with the dreadful and painfully long 60-second Gillette Fusion spot: another overproduced dull razor commercial, complete with the super-tough announcer and epic music. This one is trying too hard and spending too much. Five blades are overkill and so is this commercial.

Another classic example demonstrating that more is less, GM uses spooky models looking like rejects from a Fellini film. The ad unfolds slower than a tortoise on crutches, and the audience is left guessing what’s rising from the pits of a mysterious liquid hell. It’s…gasp…an Escalade! The closing shot reveals only a boring chrome grill. Yawn. Been a looooong time since you rock and rolled, Cadillac.

A red and white themed spot for Overstock.com features a woman trying to sell everything from housewares and clothes to vacations and gewgaws while reminding us “It’s all about the O.” Next follows a confusion of possible taglines. Why pick one when you can have three? The woman whispers, “Make the O part of your life” which seems to be an orgasm reference, then again reminds us, “It’s all about the O.” Yeah? Well, in this case, O=Offensive.

Diet Pepsi as a celebrity? Brown and Bubbly as a tagline? What were they thinking on this one? In a meeting with Jay Mohr (reprising his role from Jerry McGuire as a smarmy agent), P Diddy promises to grant mutual creative control in order to get a can of Pepsi on his record label. The session features a group of men and women moaning and flirting with the can of Pepsi on a pedestal to the tune of “You want it.” No thanks. Brown and Bubbly…bad and burpy. Hardly appetizing.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/06/news/companies/superbowl_adrecap/?cnn=yes

Creature comfort for Super Bowl ads

Humorous spots featuring horses, sheep, and chimps were among the most popular Super Bowl commercials, experts say.

By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com senior writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – The commercials that aired during Super Bowl XL Sunday night, like the game itself, probably won’t go down in history as being all that memorable.

“It was pretty much standard fare,” said Paul Murray, creative director at Pavone, a brand consulting firm based in Harrisburg, Pa., that runs SpotBowl.com, a Web site where viewers can vote for their favorite commercials. “It was a lot of animals and broad humor. There were not too many surprises.”

Among the bigger winners, according to several ad experts as well as online polls of Super Bowl viewers, were many of the usual suspects, including Anheuser-Busch, which bought 10 spots during the game.

According to the SpotBowl site Monday morning, Anheuser-Busch had four of the top six most popular commercials, including one showing a junior Clydesdale horse trying to pull a cart, one with a bear getting in the way of a man’s Bud Light and one that depicted a sheep streaking across the field while the horses were playing football.

But the most popular spot on SpotBowl.com was one by FedEx which featured a caveman getting fired for not shipping a package with FedEx despite complaining to his boss that FedEx hadn’t even been invented yet.

The FedEx spot and several of the Anheuser-Busch spots were also among the most popular commercials according to votes on AOL. (AOL, like CNNMoney.com, is owned by Time Warner.)

Overall though, it was not a stellar crop of commercials, experts said.

“It was another mixed bag. Every year, the hype gets bigger but I’m not sure the ads could live up to it,” said Paul Hirsch, an executive vice president and group creative head at Leo Burnett USA, an ad agency.

Leo Burnett USA was the agency behind the ad for the Cadillac Escalade as well as the Disney commercial which showed players from the Seahawks and Steelers practicing saying “I’m going to Disney World.”

Career Builder’s chimps

But Hirsch agreed that Anheuser-Busch and FedEx did well. He also thought that commercials from Ameriquest and CareerBuilder.com, which brought back the popular chimpanzees from last year and even included some jackasses in its second spot, were also effective.

Hirsch joked though that the use of animals is quickly becoming a Super Bowl cliche.

“Super Bowl ad rule number one is put a critter in a spot and it should do well,” he said.

Tim Calkins, an associate professor of marketing with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, also thought that there was nothing particularly noteworthy in this year’s crop of ads that would differentiate them from the commercials of the past few years.

“I don’t think there was anything dramatically out of the ordinary. Humor still works well,” he said.

Calkins, who graded advertisers with a group of Kellogg MBA students from the school’s marketing club, agreed that Anheuser-Busch and CareerBuilder.com were winners Sunday night.

The group also gave strong reviews to ads for Diet Pepsi and MasterCard as well as Dove, which Calkins thinks stood out because of its serious message regarding self-esteem for young girls.

Kieran Taylor, director of product marketing for Akamai, a Web content delivery firm that tracked online traffic for more than half of the advertisers during the game, also said that Dove looked like a big winner. He said that traffic to Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty Web site surged after the ad aired in the second quarter and again towards the end of the game.

“Madison Avenue has been talking a lot about the convergence of TV and the Internet being market nirvana,” Taylor said. “This is the first time we’ve been able to measure that and confirm that convergence is occurring. This is a message for advertisers that have been hesitant to embrace the online channel.” Taylor added that there was a significant spike in traffic at the end of the game for several other advertisers as well.

Should have stayed away?

But which companies may have been better off not spending big bucks for a Super Bowl ad? (The average price for a 30-second spot was $2.5 million, a new record.)

Calkins said he and his students thought that Emerald Nuts, Nationwide, Motorola and GoDaddy.com, which was back with a slightly less ribald ad than last year featuring a buxom woman in the office of a network censor, all flopped.

Hirsch and Murray panned the GoDaddy ad as well. And Hirsch called the Emerald ad, which featured a druid and men with machetes, “bizarrely strange.”

The minute-long musical ad for Burger King also left some people scratching their heads in bemusement. Murray said that despite a lot of hype for the commercial, it was doing just moderately well in the SpotBowl, ranking as the eleventh most popular ad.

Hirsch said the fast food chain should be commended for having commercials that are vastly different than McDonald’s, its top competitor.

But he said he didn’t think the commercial, which showed women dressed as pickles, onions, ketchup and other parts of a burger, would actually make people more interested in going to Burger King.

“I’m not sure it would make me go out and buy a Whopper,” Hirsch said.

So here’s hoping that next year, both the commercials and the game are a little more entertaining.

via cnnmoney.printthis.clickability.com

money.cnn.com

Creature comfort for Super Bowl ads

Humorous spots featuring horses, sheep, and chimps were among the most popular Super Bowl commercials, experts say.

By Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com senior writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – The commercials that aired during Super Bowl XL Sunday night, like the game itself, probably won’t go down in history as being all that memorable.

“It was pretty much standard fare,” said Paul Murray, creative director at Pavone, a brand consulting firm based in Harrisburg, Pa., that runs SpotBowl.com, a Web site where viewers can vote for their favorite commercials. “It was a lot of animals and broad humor. There were not too many surprises.”

Among the bigger winners, according to several ad experts as well as online polls of Super Bowl viewers, were many of the usual suspects, including Anheuser-Busch, which bought 10 spots during the game.

According to the SpotBowl site Monday morning, Anheuser-Busch had four of the top six most popular commercials, including one showing a junior Clydesdale horse trying to pull a cart, one with a bear getting in the way of a man’s Bud Light and one that depicted a sheep streaking across the field while the horses were playing football.

But the most popular spot on SpotBowl.com was one by FedEx which featured a caveman getting fired for not shipping a package with FedEx despite complaining to his boss that FedEx hadn’t even been invented yet.

The FedEx spot and several of the Anheuser-Busch spots were also among the most popular commercials according to votes on AOL. (AOL, like CNNMoney.com, is owned by Time Warner.)

Overall though, it was not a stellar crop of commercials, experts said.

“It was another mixed bag. Every year, the hype gets bigger but I’m not sure the ads could live up to it,” said Paul Hirsch, an executive vice president and group creative head at Leo Burnett USA, an ad agency.

Leo Burnett USA was the agency behind the ad for the Cadillac Escalade as well as the Disney commercial which showed players from the Seahawks and Steelers practicing saying “I’m going to Disney World.”

Career Builder’s chimps

But Hirsch agreed that Anheuser-Busch and FedEx did well. He also thought that commercials from Ameriquest and CareerBuilder.com, which brought back the popular chimpanzees from last year and even included some jackasses in its second spot, were also effective.

Hirsch joked though that the use of animals is quickly becoming a Super Bowl cliché.

“Super Bowl ad rule number one is put a critter in a spot and it should do well,” he said.

Tim Calkins, an associate professor of marketing with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, also thought that there was nothing particularly noteworthy in this year’s crop of ads that would differentiate them from the commercials of the past few years.

“I don’t think there was anything dramatically out of the ordinary. Humor still works well,” he said.

Calkins, who graded advertisers with a group of Kellogg MBA students from the school’s marketing club, agreed that Anheuser-Busch and CareerBuilder.com were winners Sunday night.

The group also gave strong reviews to ads for Diet Pepsi and MasterCard as well as Dove, which Calkins thinks stood out because of its serious message regarding self-esteem for young girls.

Kieran Taylor, director of product marketing for Akamai, a Web content delivery firm that tracked online traffic for more than half of the advertisers during the game, also said that Dove looked like a big winner. He said that traffic to Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty Web site surged after the ad aired in the second quarter and again towards the end of the game.

“Madison Avenue has been talking a lot about the convergence of TV and the Internet being market nirvana,” Taylor said. “This is the first time we’ve been able to measure that and confirm that convergence is occurring. This is a message for advertisers that have been hesitant to embrace the online channel.” Taylor added that there was a significant spike in traffic at the end of the game for several other advertisers as well.

Should have stayed away?

But which companies may have been better off not spending big bucks for a Super Bowl ad? (The average price for a 30-second spot was $2.5 million, a new record.)

Calkins said he and his students thought that Emerald Nuts, Nationwide, Motorola and GoDaddy.com, which was back with a slightly less ribald ad than last year featuring a buxom woman in the office of a network censor, all flopped.

Hirsch and Murray panned the GoDaddy ad as well. And Hirsch called the Emerald ad, which featured a druid and men with machetes, “bizarrely strange.”

The minute-long musical ad for Burger King also left some people scratching their heads in bemusement. Murray said that despite a lot of hype for the commercial, it was doing just moderately well in the SpotBowl, ranking as the eleventh most popular ad.

Hirsch said the fast food chain should be commended for having commercials that are vastly different than McDonald’s, its top competitor.

But he said he didn’t think the commercial, which showed women dressed as pickles, onions, ketchup and other parts of a burger, would actually make people more interested in going to Burger King.

“I’m not sure it would make me go out and buy a Whopper,” Hirsch said.

So here’s hoping that next year, both the commercials and the game are a little more entertaining.

As Ad Prices Rise, Companies Push to Grab Viewers’ Attention

There are many Americans who will tune into the biggest football game of the year not for the Pittsburgh-Seattle matchup, but for the commercials that will air.

From the beloved to the controversial, some Super Bowl commercials remain etched in American memory for years. Even many of those too young to have seen the ad first air are familiar with the Coke commercial featuring football player Mean Joe Green throwing his shirt to a young fan. Budweiser beer ads, which have often pushed the propriety envelope in the past, also tend to live in infamy.

Companies are banking on the fact that these Super Bowl commercials will stick in the memories of the game’s 90 million viewers. Advertisers are paying a record $2.5 million for a single 30-second spot — up from $2.4 million last year. A 30-second prime-time spot during the Olympics costs about $700,000.

This year, the experts expect big things from little known company, Nationwide Insurance, which is is debuting with an interesting ad featuring Fabio.

“I can’t believe it’s him,” said David Riley, who writes about advertising and marketing for Businessweek magazine.” If he does for this what he did for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. & Insurance is something people don’t want to think about. If you can get name awareness, which is a big part of what we’re try to do, you’ve got a home run.”

For his part, Fabio said that he had to sit still for 5 1/2 hours while makeup artists made him into an 85-year-old man for the commercial.

“They made me look like a T-Rex,” he said.

Fabio also said that he encountered some trouble while steering the gondola that was used in the commercial.

“Everybody over there takes it for granted because I’m from Italy, but actually we almost sank the gondola,” he said. “We are doing a commercial for Nationwide Insurance.”

Battle for Originality

But the experts say that Burger King poses some stiff competition. It will run a new commercial featuring cover girl Brooke Burke along with 92 singing and dancing “Whopperettes” dressed as burgers, lettuce and tomatoes. The ad will be available for download onto Sprint cell phones.

“It’s entertaining enough,” said Riley. “I have high hopes for the Burger King ad.”

“I think it will be the most talked-about ad of the Super Bowl,” said Rosemarie Ryan, co-president of J. Walter Thompson ad agency.

Ryan and Riley said the Burger King ad seemed to be the most original of all the commercials — many of which feature celebrities like P. Diddy, who is doing a Diet Pepsi commercial; and Jessica Simpson, who is singing on a new Pizza Hut ad.

The Diddy and Simpson ads are predicable, but will succeed because they use popular music and intriguing celebrities, Riley said.

He gave the Diet Pepsi ad an “Eight out of 10. It’s got a lot of good ingredients. It’s got P. Diddy. It’s got rap. & It sells the product. People will remember it. I am not sure they will remember Fabio.”

Toyota is also airing its first-ever bilingual ad for a hybrid car. Riley said this showed that the car industry was taking the Hispanic market seriously.

For all the companies, the cost is high, but it pays off.

“You get a chance to show your best and brightest on the Super Bowl,” Ryan said. “Companies keep paying more each year.”

via abcnews.go.com

By Theresa Howard, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — TV is just one way viewers can have Burger King’s first Super Bowl ad in a decade.

The Whopperettes will star in a Burger King ad during the Super Bowl.

Shortly after Burger King’s 60-second ad airs before an expected 90 million Super Bowl viewers on Feb. 5, it will go out over one of the newest ad media. Millions of Sprint wireless phone subscribers with video service will have the chance to watch a longer version that includes outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage.

The ad is an over-the-top production in the spirit of MGM’s 1930s musicals: 92 “Whopperettes” dressed as burgers, flames, pickles, lettuce and tomatoes will sing and dance to new lyrics for the famous “Have it Your Way” jingle.

The ad ad will kick off a campaign of Whopper-focused advertising.

The Sprint deal is one way Burger King will try to extend the reach and shelf life of its Super Bowl ad investment — about $1 million to produce the ad and about $5 million for the minute during the game.

The ad will kick off a campaign of Whopper-focused advertising (including two more Whopperette TV ads) to general and targeted audiences.

Also rolling out for Super Sunday will be a link on burgerking.com to a special interactive Whopperettes area. The ad will be downloadable to iPods and within days will be shown in movie theaters. Whopperette posters also will go up in Burger King’s 7,600 U.S. restaurants.

“Instead of having the ad stand alone, they are surrounding it with other platforms where people are migrating,” says Andy Donchin, director of national broadcast for media buying company Carat. “You want to get the biggest bang for your buck by putting the commercial in other venues.”

But the whole multimedia effort still kicks off with the big bang of a big-event TV ad.

“As much as people want to write the TV network obituaries, alternative media becomes a way of extending what is still the No. 1 form of viewership in the world,” says Russ Klein, Burger King’s top marketer.

The blending of old and new media and promotion — from TV ads to restaurant tray liners — into an integrated campaign with every detail reinforcing the message is the signature of BK’s ad agency, the hot Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

“We’re trying to ricochet everything we have against everything we’re in,” Klein says.

Phone screen video is a new ad frontier but is already a $45 million annual business.

How it will work for Sprint video subscribers: Within 30 minutes of the ad airing, those who’ve opted to receive text messages from Sprint will get a note saying the extended ad is available on a dedicated Sprint TV channel on their handset. Sprint has 45 million subscribers but would not say how many buy video services.

“If they want to see this commercial, they can get it,” says Sprint spokeswoman Angela Read. “People are looking online for commercials. This is another way to do it.”

The phone version will be limited to about two minutes. “We’re going to be respectful of how much it burns up on run time,” Klein says.

“The Sprint partnership is one key ingredient to this overall megaplatform to deliver the Whopperettes message.”

via usatoday.com

By Theresa Howard, USA TODAY

Have a great Super Bowl ad idea?

It may not be too late to sign up for the ABC broadcast. At the end of the week, ABC still had a few 30-second ad slots up for grabs — good news for an advertiser looking to get a deep discount on the average $2.5 million price tag.

MasterCard took advantage with a late entry, signing on late last week. They didn’t get the choicest real estate — the ad will air in the fourth quarter — but Amy Fuller, who oversees marketing in the Americas, says every quarter is worth it: “The ratings hold strong. There isn’t a dud quarter. It’s a good value.”

MasterCard features actor Richard Dean Anderson, TV’s MacGyver, using his MasterCard debit card to buy common items (a tube sock, a paper clip and an air freshener) that he uses to get out of a jam in true MacGyver fashion. “We have a great message that will hold up to the very high standards of people’s expectations,” she says.

What Super Bowl viewers — an estimated 90 million this Sunday — have come to expect from ads is to be entertained. It’s the one TV event where viewers pay nearly as much attention to the ads as the game. For that reason, ABC is not worried about selling the remaining ad slots.

“We feel really good about where we are,” says Ed Erhardt, head of sales and marketing for ABC and ESPN. “We’ll be sold out at game time.”

Taking one of the last slots on Thursday was GoDaddy.com. The domain-name company finally got the OK from ABC for a racy ad after its 14th revision. GoDaddy President Bob Parsons said they didn’t pick a fight just to drum up more buzz.

“We got a lot of publicity, and we’re very happy about that, but this was always about getting the ad approved.”

GoDaddy now has the OK to join more than 25 advertisers that will fill 30 minutes of ad time during the game.

Among trends in the ads:

•Office politics. In a Bud Light ad, a plan to hide bottles of the brew throughout an office to motivate employees leads to havoc. Job site CareerBuilder, part-owned by USA TODAY parent Gannett, brings back its office chimps from the Super Bowl last year. “Monkeys resonate with consumers because we can all relate to office situations that are difficult,” says Richard Castellini, CareerBuilder’s vice president of consumer marketing.

•Global perspectives. Some of the ads this year for this most American of events are global themes from global ad agencies. For example, Degree for Men’s stunt-themed ads, by Lowe Worldwide, aired around the world last year.

Motorola’s Pebl phone ad, by 180 Amsterdam, began to run last fall. “This ad was not created with Super Bowl in mind,” says Adam Chasnow, 180′s creative director. “It’s not designed to have the quick hit, but it’s visually stunning.”

•Movie madness. The game continues to be a popular venue for Hollywood to hype its blockbuster hopefuls.

Paramount has one ad to promote Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible III. New Line has an ad for Running Scared.

Disney Studios, which will advertise a remake of The Shaggy Dog, even created a special ad for the game instead of just showing a movie trailer. In the ad, sportscaster Chris Berman does the play-by-play on the Shaggy Dog’s moves.

“You don’t go into a highly scrutinized commercial enterprise like the Super Bowl without knowing that you have the goods,” says Oren Aviv, president of marketing at Walt Disney Studios.

•Seeking Monday morning replays. Advertisers want more than 30 seconds of your time and have paid search engines for key words linking to replays of their Super Bowl ads online. Yahoo says the number of advertisers paying to advertise their Super Bowl ads is double last year.

That’s because results are easily measurable, says Ron Belanger, Yahoo senior director of strategy and development. “They know exactly what return they are getting and know what they can afford to pay.”

via usatoday.com

NEW YORK It almost didn’t happen, but GoDaddy.com, the domain-name registrar that was scolded last year for running a racy commercial during the Super Bowl, got approval from ABC today to run a spot during this year’s big game.

“This showdown went down to the wire. We were about out of time and had produced our 14th and final attempt. I’m ecstatic about being in the Super Bowl again,” said Bob Parsons, founder and president of GoDaddy.com, in a statement.

GoDaddy said it went through multiple revisions of its ad and had negotiated with network censors before it finally won approval.

Last year, GoDaddy.com’s commercial, a parody on censorship in the wake of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” the year before, was pulled before it aired a scheduled second time during the Super Bowl. The ensuing controversy resulted in more than $11 million of publicity for GoDaddy, according to broadcast monitoring service Multivision Inc.

Parsons has been mining the controversy for publicity ever since his first attempt to buy time this year was rebuffed by ABC. He has been chronicling the efforts on his blog, BobParsons.com, where various iterations of the ad can be viewed.

It was not known how much GoDaddy is paying to run the ad. Per sources, the average 30-second slot on the upcoming Super Bowl is selling for about $2.5 million.

—Brandweek staff report

via adweek.com

Barnet D. Wolf THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

NATIONWIDE Things go wrong for Fabio in Nationwide’s new commercial.

Nationwide, which quietly dipped its toe into network advertising last year with spots in pro golf tournaments and college football, is spending more than $1 million for a 30-second ad during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.

The commercial, featuring romance-novel-cover king Fabio, is the latest production in the “Life Comes at You Fast” ad campaign, now in its third year. The company has two other new spots in the pregame show.

The decision to pony up big bucks for the Super Bowl “is as much to raise awareness” about Nationwide as it is to sell products, said Steven Schreibman, vice president for advertising and brand management.

He declined to say how much the commercial time would cost, only that the Super Bowl ad is less than the $2.5 million average being quoted by ABC.

“We got a good deal,” Schreibman said.

The financial-services and insurance company, based in Columbus, is expanding its advertising budget 40 percent this year to an estimated $85 million in a bid to increase public awareness in the company.

As in previous commercials developed for Nationwide, the ads show how quickly fortunes can turn.

The ad featuring Fabio (his full name is Fabio Lanzoni) was filmed in Venice and appears to be a shampoo commercial before it changes directions to play havoc with his image.

“I thought it was really funny, and that is why it is a good commercial,” Fabio said yesterday. “If you know me personally, I love to have fun in life. I never take myself seriously.”

The 45-year-old, long-haired personality doesn?t pose for bodice- rippers anymore. Instead, he works on a line of women?s clothing that carries his name.

The commercial is Nationwide?s second spot featuring a “celebrity.”

Last year, an ad with former rapper M.C. Hammer played humorously on what happens to someone who doesn?t plan for the time when his 15 minutes of fame are over.

“The Super Bowl is a wonderful venue for getting your message in front of a large portion of the U.S. population,” said Tim Calkins, an associate professor of marketing at Northwestern University?s Kellogg School of Management.

“It also makes a statement that you are a player.”

Many of the nation?s foremost advertisers create Super Bowl ads. Of the 60 commercials that run during the game, people really talk about a handful. Just as important, “you don?t want yours to be considered a dud,” he said.

Despite the Super Bowl spot, Nationwide won?t do much network TV advertising this year.

Schreibman said the company also will be advertising on the Internet by targeting specific national Web pages.

via dispatch.com

George Raine

Super Bowl XL will feature a mix of longtime advertisers, such as beer giant Anheuser-Busch, and others making their debut, including American Home Health, marketer of industrial-strength cleaning products.

Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser, won’t select the final choices for its 10 slots until the eve of the game, but it’s hard to imagine they’ll pass on one, described in the New York Times, that features a young Clydesdale getting the attention of his parents. The ad agency is DDB Worldwide.

The popular chimpanzee stars of CareerBuilder.com’s Super Bowl ads by Cramer Krasselt are returning in two humorous tales of a human employee working in an office populated entirely by apes.

Leonard Nimoy — Mr. Spock on “Star Trek” — takes a turn for Bayer’s Aleve pain reliever in an ad by Energy BBDO, part of the BBDO Worldwide unit of Omnicom. He’s having a bit of pain, but Aleve helps him do what he has to do.

The Super Bowl is always a popular venue for motion picture studios to promote upcoming feature films. AdAge reports that Buena Vista Pictures will be airing an ad for a remake of “Shaggy Dog” starring Tim Allen.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. will have ads for “Poseidon,” the remake of “Poseidon Adventure” starring Josh Lucas and Kurt Russell; “V for Vendetta” with Natalie Portman; and “16 Blocks” starring Bruce Willis and Mos Def.

Sprint is the sponsor of the half-time show featuring the Rolling Stones, and will air ads by TBWA/Chiat Day about its new technology.

McDonald’s, which typically advertises during the Super Bowl, will have only one pregame slot this year as it concentrates its marketing on the Olympic Winter Games.

That leaves the Super Bowl to Burger King, with a prime spot right after kickoff, featuring the King versus NFL players, done by Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

General Motors’ Cadillac, for the fifth consecutive year the official vehicle of the Super Bowl, will be promoting its 2007 Escalade sport utility vehicle, one of which will awarded to the game’s most valuable player. The advertising, by Leo Burnett Detroit, associates the Escalade with fashion and luxury.

via sfgate.com

The Super Bowl Remains The Best Way To Launch New Ad Campains

By Julia M Sieger

NEW YORK If Miss Piggy is dressing up like Jessica Simpson, monkeys are rampaging around office cubicles and networking druids are yammering into cell phones, it can only mean one thing: Super Bowl ads are on the way.

Despite nagging worries about declining TV viewership as more people plug in to their iPods and the Internet, the Super Bowl has proven to be a resilient stronghold of truly mass media. The game, which airs Feb. 5 on Walt Disney Co.’s ABC, is expected to draw some 90 million viewers, along with the advertisers who want to reach them.

Super Bowl ads, estimated at about $2.5 million for a 30-second spot this year, cost way more than the top price of $750,000 for a spot on the Olympics, which start on NBC just five days later. For smaller marketers, that can make up a significant chunk of their annual advertising budget, That’s offset by the cachet of being seen on the Super Bowl, routinely the most watched broadcast of the year.

To make sure they get their money’s worth, several advertisers plan to leverage the impact of their spots this year by rolling out online promotions and other tie-ins.

Emerald Nuts, the snack-food brand of Diamond Foods Inc., and the men’s deodorant Degree are both returning to the Super Bowl after successful debuts in last year’s broadcast, and both are doing more online.

Degree took a chance last year with an oddball set of ads featuring doll-like figures who never took risks. While they weren’t a huge hit with critics, the ads wound up generating a lot of interest online, says Kevin George, head of marketing at Unilever, Degree’s parent company.

This time, Degree will be making its new ad, which depicts daily life in a city populated entirely by stunt men, widely available for viewing and downloading on the Internet, including a “director’s cut” and other variations, George says.

“It really helped get the message out there in a different way”, George said of the online interest in last year’s spots, which featured characters such as a “Mama’s Boy” who got pushed around in a shopping cart by his mother.

“Not everybody’s going to love your ads”, George said. “We’re concerned that the consumers we’re talking to get the ad, and research showed that they did”.

Coming back to the Super Bowl was an easy decision after seeing sales for Degree jump 35 percent last year, which George attributed partly to the impact from the Super Bowl ad.

“It’s arguably the best, most efficient way to launch a campaign”, George said.

Emerald Nuts won attention last year with an ad featuring a talking unicorn. It is putting 10 percent of its annual ad-buying budget into the Super Bowl, stepping up a recent campaign that uses the letters of its brand to spell out surreal situations. Coming up on Super Bowl Sunday: Eagle-eyed Machete Enthusiasts Recognize A Little Druid Networking Under The Stairs.

Michael Mendes, the CEO of Diamond Foods, said the company hopes to capitalize on the word-puzzle aspect of the campaign by running ads featuring the letter jumble next to the crossword puzzle in The New York Times, and inviting readers to submit their own variations online.

Also, the goofy characters in the ad – several machete-wielding businessmen and a fast-talking druid – will be appearing in an online ad campaign around the same time as the game, Mendes said. He’s also hoping to get more for his money by convincing retailers to showcase his product around the time of the game, in hopes the ad will stir up sales.

Another of last year’s first-timers, CareerBuilder, is also coming back with a quirky campaign backed up with an online component. The online job-search company will air more ads featuring monkeys as office workers, while also running a guerilla-marketing style e-mail chain letter featuring animated monkeys who talk.

CareerBuilder, an online help-wanted ad company, is jointly owned by the newspaper publishers Gannett Co., Knight Ridder Inc. and Tribune Co.

Tim Spengler, executive vice president of Initiative, an ad-buying agency owned by The Interpublic Group of Companies Inc., says marketers are adapting their campaigns to deal with an increasingly fragmented audience.

“Media is becoming a more personalized experience, but in a communications program there is still going to be a mix of mass awareness with more one-to-one communications”, Spengler said. “For the marketer, the art is going to be in the mix of mass and personalized media”.

Other notable ads in the Super Bowl this year include a spot from Dove soap, another Unilever property, which is continuing its “Campaign for Real Beauty” campaign with spots focused on improving self-esteem among teenage girls.

Toyota Motor Corp. will also have a warm-hearted spot featuring a Hispanic father and son who switch easily between Spanish and English, and Aleve, a pain reliever owned by Bayer AG, is using a spot featuring actor Leonard Nimoy. Longtime advertisers PepsiCo Inc. and Anheuser-Busch Cos. will also be back.

Pizza Hut, a unit of Yum! Brands Inc., which also owns KFC and Taco Bell, is once again showcasing the Muppets, who won over viewers last year with an airborne Miss Piggy. The ad also features singer Jessica Simpson, who appeared alongside the Jim Henson characters two years ago. Miss Piggy and Simpson will wear matching outfits.

“The Muppets bring a wink and a smile to it”, says Tom James, chief marketing officer for Pizza Hut. “It’s pizza after all it’s not something that serious. It’s about fun and enjoyment.”

via cbsnews.com

By Suzanne Vranica and Brian Steinberg, The Wall Street Journal

By the time Super Bowl XL kicks off in Detroit in 11 days, Marlene Coulis will have clocked hundreds of hours in effort and thousands of miles in travel preparing for the moment.

A marketing executive at brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos., Ms. Coulis has almost as much at stake in the game as the players. Long one of the Super Bowl’s biggest sponsors, Anheuser this year has bought five minutes of ad time for its brands including Budweiser and Bud Light — more time than any other advertiser in the broadcast.

Anheuser sees the Super Bowl and its expected U.S. audience of 90 million viewers as more than an opportunity to promote its brands or sell beer. It sees a chance to be seen as funny, prompting favorable reviews Monday morning by workplace advertising critics.

“Water-cooler talk is really important. It’s a measure of success,” says Ms. Coulis, vice president for brand management at Anheuser. “If you can get the commercial to be part of pop culture, it makes the ad more memorable.” Scoring big with viewers also helps galvanize retailers and wholesalers, important constituents in the selling of beer, particularly in the months leading up to the big summer beer selling season.

The Super Bowl is the only TV program whose viewers rate ads in several online and newspaper polls. Anheuser is serious about winning top ranking in those polls, include those conducted by The Wall Street Journal and Gannett Co.’s USA Today.

Anheuser spots have regularly come out on top in various post-game rankings over the past several years, a sign of how the brewer has perfected the science of Super Bowl ads. The game ads are about “setting up a story, telling a joke and having an unexpected twist at the end,” Ms. Coulis says.

A high-ranking spot for Bud Light last year showed a man attempting to sky dive. A six-pack tossed out of the plane enticed the nervous man to take the plunge. The surprise ending? The pilot abandoned the plane in pursuit of the beer.

In this year’s broadcast, airing Feb. 5 on Walt Disney Co.’s ABC network, Anheuser is expected to follow the winning formula down to the last gag. In one spot likely to appear, which Anheuser previewed before so reporters Tuesday, two slacker guys try to escape from a grizzly bear, and Bud Light helps save the day. In another, Anheuser’s veteran Super Bowl pitchman, Cedric the Entertainer, walks down the aisle to score a pack of Bud Light. The brewer says the spots’ secret, final plot twist is a maneuver that will help them score with viewers in the Super Bowl Sunday polling.

“Generally, you have to have a joke or pay off at the end of the commercial to win,” says Bob Scarpelli, world-wide chief creativity officer at Omnicom Group’s DDB, who has worked on dozens of Super Bowl ads over the years for Anheuser-Busch and others. He refers to the unexpected ending as “the reveal.”

Anheuser’s marketing machine starts working on its Super Bowl spots months before the game. Several of the agencies from Anheuser’s roster crafted about 50 spots. In the end, Anheuser will choose only about 10 of them to run during the game. (The others will probably be used in other campaigns.) The decision-making isn’t done yet, with Ms. Coulis and her marketing team conducting focus groups through this week to help select the ones that will air. The research team has been traveling to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas and elsewhere to meet with more than 500 consumers and assess their reaction to the ads.

In past years, Anheuser’s focus groups used electronic devices to chart individuals’ second-by-second reactions to the spots — devices similar to ones used by USA Today for its Super Bowl ad poll.

Anheuser tests are set to continue until just days before the game. The brewer is known for making last minute changes to its Super Bowl ads, as late as even a day before the game. And the work doesn’t end with the broadcast: A handful of Anheuser executives stay up late on Super Bowl Sunday to call reporters and surf the Web for a sense of how they did in various polls.

The obsession over one telecast underscores how valuable the Super Bowl has become as a mass-market advertising arena, in an increasingly fragmented media world. The broadcast not only draws an audience roughly four times as big as most popular TV shows, but it also draws an audience that is very likely to be watching the ads and not using TiVo-like devices to skip through commercial breaks.

That helps drive the price of spots skyward: This year, prices are running as high as $2.5 million for a 30-second spot, up from $2.4 million last year. The ad inventory of roughly 60 30-second spots, isn’t quite sold out: A handful of spots are still available, a person familiar with the situation says.

Advertisers are returning to more spectacular ads this year, after having toned down their Super Bowl spots last year, when Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the half-time show at the 2004 Super Bowl was still a vivid memory. “The Super Bowl didn’t have a special feel, and the ads reflected that,” says Rob Reilly, a creative executive at a hot Miami agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky.

Indeed, last year Anheuser steered clear of raunchy and sophomoric humor: One ad showed people applauding as military personnel walked through an airport.

But Super Bowl advertisers face risks if they deviate too far from expectations. PepsiCo Inc., famous for its celebrity-stuffed Super Bowl spots, tried something different in 2004 and highlighted the compatibility of its beverages with food. The ads didn’t score well with viewers.

This year, one of Pepsi’s Super Bowl ads is expected to feature comedian Jay Mohr in the role of a Hollywood agent representing Diet Pepsi. A slew of celebrities line up to work with the cool beverage. “There is no doubt that celebrities add excitement and fun, but in the end the commercial has to tie into our brand,” says Nicole Bradley, a Pepsi spokeswoman. “The goal is to make sure people are talking about our commercial the day after Super Bowl and the weeks following the game.”

Others also are counting on celebrity magic include Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., whose commercial will feature Fabio, the buff, long-haired heartthrob. Leonard Nimoy, of ‘Star Trek’ fame, will hawk Aleve, the Bayer AG pain reliever.

Big production numbers are back this year. Burger King Corp. plans to air an elaborate, 60-second ad that takes its cue from a Broadway musical, starring 92 glamorous “Whopperettes” dressed as burgers, pickles, lettuce and tomatoes and singing and dancing to new lyrics for the famous “Have It Your Way” jingle. Another big production number is expected from Unilever’s Degree for Men deodorant, featuring some 30 stuntmen, stunt women and stunt kids. In the ad, a man falls from a window, and a motorbike crashes through a glass window pane.

Humor isn’t the only Super Bowl ad gimmick. Animals are another proven vote-getter. Anheuser is expected to bring back the Clydesdale horses. And careerbuilder.com, a job Web site owned by Gannett, Tribune Co. and Knight Ridder Inc., will run two spots featuring monkeys at the office.

via post-gazette.com

By STUART ELLIOTT

THE players on the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks who will participate in their first Super Bowl have a counterpart on Madison Avenue. On the biggest day of the year for advertising, the biggest advertiser is entrusting a newcomer to select its commercials.

The rookie is Marlene V. Coulis, who last August took over as vice president for brand management at the Anheuser-Busch beer division of the Anheuser-Busch Companies in St. Louis. Ms. Coulis succeeded Robert Lachky, who had long overseen the decisions by Anheuser-Busch about which spots would run during the Super Bowl for which brands.

Under Mr. Lachky, Anheuser-Busch’s commercials often ranked highly – frequently coming in first – in the many postgame polls and surveys asking consumers which spots they liked the most. Each year, Anheuser-Busch usually buys more commercial time than any other advertiser during the Super Bowl, which is typically the most-watched TV show of the year.

According to TNS Media Intelligence, a division of Taylor Nelson Sofres that tracks ad spending, Anheuser-Busch paid $230.5 million for Super Bowl spots from 1986 through 2005, 28 percent more than the next largest spender, PepsiCo, at $180 million.

During Super Bowl XL on Feb. 5, to be broadcast by ABC, Anheuser-Busch plans to run five minutes of spots for brands like Budweiser, Bud Light, Budweiser Select and new Michelob Ultra Amber. The company is considering about 15 commercials and will probably end up with 8 or 9; Ms. Coulis expects to finish winnowing them down by the middle of next week.

ABC, part of the Walt Disney Company, is selling each 30 seconds of commercial time during the game for an estimated average of $2.5 million, up from the $2.4 million that Fox Broadcasting charged during the Super Bowl last February. Major advertisers like Anheuser-Busch usually get better rates, although the company has to spend an additional unspecified sum to remain the exclusive beer sponsor during the game, which it has been since 1989.

When Ms. Coulis took over for Mr. Lachky, who was promoted, she became the first woman and the first Hispanic to supervise brand management – and the Super Bowl roster – for America’s largest brewer. She had previously been involved in research among consumers to gauge their opinions of Anheuser-Busch’s Super Bowl commercials.

“If there’s a new piece of insight I brought to our agencies it’s that we have a lot of female beer drinkers, a lot of coed beer-drinking situations,” Ms. Coulis said yesterday during an interview in Midtown Manhattan.

“They love beer,” Ms. Coulis said of the women who consume an estimated 20 percent of the company’s beer volume. “And they’re influencers, they have influence over brand choice,” she added, “so we want to make sure we equally appeal to males and females.”

That has not always been the case when it came to creating Anheuser-Busch beer ads, particularly the humorous pitches for Bud Light, the company’s best-selling brand. For many years, critics complained that the commercials were juvenile, sophomoric, even coarse, appealing more to jejune fraternity boys than mature adults.

In 2004, for instance, characters in the Anheuser-Busch Super Bowl commercials included a flatulent horse, a crotch-biting dog, a male monkey wooing a woman and a man whose accidental bikini-wax treatment was played for laughs. The brouhaha over Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” that year led to a reaction against salacious Super Bowl content, which led Anheuser-Busch to promise to clean up its act. As a result, the commercials last year were much tamer.

“We always want our agencies to push the envelope,” Ms. Coulis said, “but at the end of the day we want to make sure we’re properly representing the brands.”

For 2006, the goal is not “just to make a joke for a joke’s sake,” she added, but rather to infuse the commercials with the kind of humor “that will make sure drinkers find the brands appealing.”

That guidance seems to have been followed by the agencies creating the spots that Ms. Coulis is deciding among, based on a look she offered at a dozen of the 15 spots being considered. The approaches are generally broad but not burlesque, the situations silly but not stupid.

For instance, one Bud Light commercial, which shows the unintended consequences of stocking a “secret” refrigerator with Bud Light, has a clever premise and a hilarious punch line. The spot is created by DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group.

A commercial being considered for Budweiser Select is sophisticated enough to show a couple playing chess, a pursuit that rarely if ever has made its way into a Super Bowl spot. That commercial is being created by Peterson Milla Hooks, an agency best known for its glossy, offbeat campaigns for Target; it is the agency’s first work for the brand and for Anheuser-Busch.

A possible Budweiser spot tugs at the heart strings rather than hammering at the funny bone. That spot, by DDB, shows a junior Clydesdale getting some uncredited help from its parents.

Ms. Coulis said all the commercials chosen for the Super Bowl will be available for downloading immediately after the game from two Web sites, budlight.com and budweiser.com. “That’s the way we have to be thinking about our advertising,” Ms. Coulis added. “As we look to reach the ever-elusive, contemporary adult audience, we’ve got to understand where they want to be reached.”

via nytimes.com

More spots rated G; no longer a ‘beer-drinking event’

By William Spain, MarketWatch

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — When paying $2.5 million for 30 seconds of advertising time, you might think you could pretty much do anything with it.

No so when that half minute is airing during the Super Bowl, now in its 40th year.

Long known as an advertising showcase that can eclipse the on-field action, America’s Big Game remains a top venue of choice for marketers to roll out new campaigns or build on old ones. And the amount of time, money and talent they put behind those spots remains undiminished.

But as the event has evolved from a male-dominated sports program to a family affair — and following howls of outrage over alleged indecencies ranging from Janet Jackson’s exposed breast to a dot-com ad making fun of it — so has the scrutiny over what kind of commercial messages are appropriate.

Changing audience

“This has been a very top-of-mind subject for us,” said Mark Monteiro, executive creative director of DDB Los Angeles, an Omnicom Group (NYSE:OMC) company. He declined to discuss the content of the Super Bowl commercial his firm did this year for Ameriquest Mortgage Co., but said: “The Super Bowl audience has changed over the last few years from a guys’ beer-drinking event. Somewhere along the line, it truly turned into family entertainment, family viewing.”

Unlike virtually all other sports programming, in the Super Bowl, “it seems there really is 50% women and kids in the room,” which has had a significant impact on the content of the ads, Monteiro added.

And this year, he noted, the game will be on ABC rather than Fox, a part of News Corp. (NASDAQ:NWS) . ABC, owned by Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS) , “is considered the toughest censor of all the networks we deal with.”

Advertisers typically stay mum about details of their ads until they air, or a short time before that. A spot for Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F) by JWT Detroit, a unit of WPP Group (LSE:UK:WPP) remains cloaked in secrecy but it will be “super G-rated,” said an executive familiar with the ad.

In a preview by Advertising Age, it appears that humor — clean humor — is likely to be the order of the day.  Among them: Burger King has its “King” going up against football players while Careerbuilder.com will bring back its company-running monkeys, the trade magazine reported.

While all broadcasters set basic minimum standards and practices for both programming and ads, how far they’re willing to bend the guidelines depends on audience makeup and other factors.

‘Highest standards’

ABC declined to go into specifics about how standards and practices may vary from say, Monday Night Football, to the Super Bowl. But in a written statement, an ABC spokeswoman said the network is aware the Super Bowl can draw the biggest television audience of the year, and “we routinely require the highest standards for all the material broadcast.”

That audience is indeed enormous: Last year, Fox drew the highest rating in its history as a network with an estimated 86.1 million viewers — down a bit from the 89.8 million pairs of eyeballs CBS (NYSE:CBS) pulled in 2004. By contrast, that is more than double what Fox drew for the NFC Championship on Sunday and better than triple the average for the highest-rated primetime program, “CSI.”

Among the advertisers looking to get in front of that crowd are Burger King, FedEx (NYSE:FDX) , Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) , Ameriquest, PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP) and General Motors (OTHER:MTLQQ) . Anheuser-Busch (NYSE:BUD) is the largest single buyer, with a total of 10 spots throughout the game, and all of the marketers are seeking mass reach in varying degrees.

However, almost as compelling as the number of people who watch is how they watch it, according to one top media buyer.

“The viewing dynamic is unlike anything else in media,” said Tim Spengler, director of national broadcast at Initiative, a media buying and planning arm of Interpublic Group (NYSE:IPG) . “The attention paid to the commercials is greater there than anywhere else in TV.”

Group viewing

Because the ads are watched in, and critiqued by, groups of viewers, they can generate a more intense audience response, he said.

“If you watch a sitcom at home alone, the chances of you laughing out loud at something are less than if you are watching it with five friends,” Spengler said.

That means Super Bowl ads also attract closer scrutiny from the broadcasters: “There is no greater spotlight. There is absolutely no ability to hide anything. Where they might look the other way, they won’t in this case.”

Neither will the media. The advertisements are endlessly written and talked about — even shown for free — in the days before and after the game, giving advertisers the biggest possible bangs for their very big bucks.

“The ads carry with them the potential to create an extended conversation around the copy,” said Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Intelliseek, a research firm. That means a “word-of-mouth multiplier” which can add significantly to a campaign’s return on investment, he said.

An ad that bores or offends, or one that is just tailored too narrowly for such a broad audience, can eat away at that added value, he said.

Even the best spots can be overshadowed by circumstances beyond the advertiser’s control, Blankenship pointed out. The Janet Jackson incident of two years ago “siphoned off the water-cooler conversation.”

Deliberately pushing the envelope can be its own reward in terms of getting extra attention.

Las Vegas always makes a fuss that it can’t promote the city during the game because of the NFL’s ban on any gambling-related commercials. Last year, GoDaddy.com, an Internet service company, parodied the Jackson brouhaha in a risqué ad, and Fox pulled it after one of two scheduled showings during the game.

This year, it has submitted, and resubmitted, another ad that it says ABC keeps rejecting.

In a written statement, GoDaddy.com founder Bob Parsons said, “It would be disappointing if the Super Bowl, which has long been known as the world’s stage for the most innovative and cutting-edge advertisements, lost its relevance for adventurous companies…”

Joe Mandese, editor of MediaPost, which covers the advertising and industry, said submitting ads that get rejected has generated barrels of free ink for GoDaddy, which will reap the benefits of Super Bowl hype — even if its spot never makes it onto the air.

“Remember,” he said, “when they get into a pissing match with ABC about buying an ad, they are also getting guys like us to write about it.”

via marketwatch.com