Superbowl-ads.com Article Archive

Robby Persinger is a safety specialist at Hyundai Motor Man­ufacturing Alabama. Normally, he spends his time at work evalu­ating equipment and work pro­cesses for the automaker.

But Saturday, he was a star of sorts.

Persinger and a couple hun­dred of his co-workers have been part of a four-day process to make a 60-second Hyundai Super Bowl ad.

“Hollywood’s come to Alaba­ma,” Persinger said Saturday morning while waiting for one of his seconds-long scenes to be filmed.

About 225 Hyundai employ­ees were on hand Saturday for crowd scenes in the commercial, but Persinger was one of about 25 who were selected through an audition process to be in the fore­front of a few scenes.

But Persinger isn’t bragging about his acting career yet.

“You hope that you don’t get cut out, or that it’s not just the back of your head,” he said. “But it’s just a great experience to be a part of.”

The content of the minute-long commercial is confidential.

Hyundai spokesman Robert Burns said it does not focus on the Sonatas or Elantras that are built there, but the Hyundai brand.

Shots were filmed all around the facility in south Montgomery. There are several paid actors in the spot, but Burns said he was insistent that local employees get a chance to participate, too.

“If the commercial involves a team member job, it has to be a team member in that role,” he said. “That was my request. Why would you pay 200 actors when you have 2,000 team members?”

This year, Hyundai has pur­chased three minutes worth of commercials that will air before and during Super Bowl XLVI on Feb. 5.

The Korean automaker’s plans include two or three pre-game commercials, two commer­cials during the second half of the game and the 60-second spot be­fore the kickoff.

John Krafcik, Hyundai’s pres­ident and CEO, told the Detroit Free Press that this year, the company wants to have more fun with its ads.

Read More at: Montgomery Advertiser

The kerfuffle over collaborative coupon service Groupon’s decidedly foolish Super Bowl ads just won’t die.

In a recent company profile in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Groupon’s 30-year-old CEO Andrew Mason placed the blame for the commercials — one of which seemed to many to equate the plight of Tibet with saving money on dinner — pointedly on the shoulders of the advertising firm that created the spot, CP&B.

According to Mason, his company put too much faith in the agency’s ability “to be edgy, informative and entertaining, and we turned off the part of our brain where we should have made our own decisions. We learned that you can’t rely on anyone else to control and maintain your own brand.”

While the statement doesn’t contradict Groupon’s earlier explanation, it seems to pass the buck for the highly public debacle from Groupon to CP&B.

Immediately following the Super Bowl ad uproar, Marshall wrote on the Groupon blog that the ads were not meant to offend, but instead to poke fun at the other Super Bowl ads “that glorify antisocial behavior – like the scores of Super Bowl ads that are built around the crass objectification of women.” In short, the Group on ads were just a big misunderstanding — one that has led Groupon to cut ties with CP&B as its advertising firm.

“The situation illustrates a classic tension in marketer-agency relationships,” says Ad Age‘s Rupal Parekh. “Clients say they want to take risks, but later realize they weren’t ready or can’t stomach the criticism associated with them.”

As Parekh points out, CP&B is known for taking risks, having produced such recent notable spots as Burger King’s “Whopper Virgins” campaign, which had people around the world who’d never had a Whopper try one; and Domino’s controversial ad in which it admitted it made crappy pizza. (Burger King has also since stopped doing business with CP&B, so perhaps that one didn’t go over so well either.)

Groupon is in a prime position to do exactly as it pleases. The company is planning to launch a new service that connects customers with restaurants and other venues that are offering deals in their close proximity. This has helped the company earned a reported valuation of $25 billion, despite whatever bad press it may have received for a couple of tacky ads.

Read more at : Business Insider

Super Bowl XLV ads drew favorable reviews compared to years past, and that combined with the ever-expanding Super Bowl audience has prompted NBC to hike its asking price for ad slots for Super Bowl XLVI.

NBC is reportedly seeking $3.5 million per 30-second slot for the next Super Bowl, up significantly from the roughly $3 million asking price for Super Bowl XLV.

AdAge reports that NBC was encouraged by FOX’s quick sellout of its Super Bowl ad slots and has been holding negotiations with prospective Super Bowl XLVI advertisers for several months already.

Read more at: FastCompany

Daily discount service Groupon spent millions of dollars on a couple controversial Super Bowl spots–before almost immediately apologizing for the commercials and pulling them from the airwaves.

But if CEO Andrew Mason’s candid response–”We hate that we offended people, and we’re sorry that we did it”–wasn’t evidence enough that these ads were poorly executed, a new report from Nielsen leaves nothing to the imagination.

Nielsen measured whether the large viewership of the Super Bowl spots helped increase traffic to advertisers’ websites. Those notoriously scandalous ads from GoDaddy.com? Rocketed post-Super Bowl traffic 41% in terms of unique visits, the biggest lift for any sponsor. Volkswagen? The spots boosted traffic 27%. HomeAway.com? By 27% too. Even Mercedes-Benz managed to jack the strat by 9%–and the company isn’t an exclusive or traditional web service.

So how did Groupon.com fare? During the week following the Super Bowl compared to the week prior, Groupon increased traffic by a paltry 3%–a negligible boost given how expensive a Super Bowl spot is and the hundred million-plus consumers who viewed it live.

Compare that to competitor LivingSocial, which managed to surge traffic 80% with just one popular discount on Amazon.com.

Groupon did win one category however: Super Bowl advertiser buzz. Groupon’s ads, a spoof on celebrity charity endorsements, caused plenty of conversation, placing the rookie Super Bowl telecast advertiser as the No. 5 most buzzed about brand out of all Super Bowl advertisers,” said Nielsen. “Among the pure-online players, Groupon took the top spot, capturing 10.5% of total Super Bowl marketing buzz the day after the game, three times the buzz of GoDaddy, which had the largest increase in web traffic.”

Read more at: The Examiner

The Academy Awards show is this weekend, and advertisers are talking about some of the Oscars commercials you can expect to see.

So far, the Oscars commercial line-up looks to be a mix of ads that have already aired during the 2011 Super Bowl and the Grammys, along with a few new spots produced specifically for the Academy Awards.

AT&T – Odds are that the AT&T Oscar commercial will promote either the $49 3G phone sale, or take another oblique swipe at Verizon in the ongoing series of competing iPhone commercials.

Hyundai – This is the automaker’s third year as the exclusive car sponsor of the Academy Awards. The company plans to air at least nine Oscars commercials, with two running during the pre-show and seven more during the show itself. The ads will be a mix of old and new spots featuring the Sonata Hybrid, the Elantra, the Equus and others. You can probably expect to see at least one Hyundai Super Bowl commercial.

Cars.com – This Oscars commercial will be a repeat of one from the 2011 Super Bowl. Called “The Reviews are In,” the Cars.com commercial was fairly ho-hum, featuring a showroom full of talking cars comparing what reviewers had to say about them. The ad will air during the pre-show, according to a spokesman.

Dove – A brand rep said the company didn’t want to release details too far in advance of the show, but did say Dove will be debuting a new Oscars commercial for its line of body washes, Dove VisibleCare.

JC Penney – Long-time retail sponsor of the Academy Awards show, JC Penney plans to air six Oscar commercials. There will be ads for women’s fashion, men’s fashion, the Liz Claiborne line, the Cindy Crawford Style line, MNG by Mango, and JC Penney’s collaboration with People magazine. The JC Penney Oscars commercials will be posted early on the company’s Facebook page.

Best Buy – This Oscars commercial will be a re-run of an ad that aired during the Super Bowl…sort of. For the game, Best Buy ran an ad featuring Ozzy Osbourne trying to film a commercial, getting confused by technology and being replaced by Justin Bieber. Best Buy posted a series of Justin Bieber commercial alternate endings on Facebook and let viewers vote for the best one (voting ended Feb. 12). That will be Best Buy’s Oscars commercial.

Nokia – If you watched the Grammys, you may have already seen this Oscars commercial for the Nokia N8 smartphone. It shows people using their Nokias to text, take photos and make videos while on the go, and features the song “Don’t Fence Me In” by Daniel Musica and Brie Stoner.

Stella Artois – Another Super Bowl ad re-run as an Oscars commercial. This is the spot that has Oscar-winner Adrien Brody crooning to his glass of Stella Artois in a tiny nightclub full of admiring women.

Gillette Venus – Jennifer Lopez will be putting in an appearance with this Oscars commercial that first showed during the Grammys. It follows her from the stage, to the bath, to the beach with her kids, offering plenty of long looks at her legs. Lopez ends the spot by delivering the razor’s tagline: “Reveal the Goddess in you.”

Diet Coke – Expect to see four Oscars commercials for Diet Coke and one for Coca-Cola. All but one will be spots previously aired. The new Diet Coke commercial shows professionals in tech, nursing and politics all in the groove, presumably because they’re drinking Diet Coke. The ad is part of the “Stay Extraordinary” campaign.

Other advertisers expected to run Oscars commercials include Amazon.com, the American Cancer Society and several movie studios. (This is only the second year studios have been allowed to run trailers during the Oscars.)

According to ABC, all Oscars commercials had to be approved by the academy.

Read more at: Forbes

Like the stars that will be walking the red carpet, advertisers are going all out for the Academy Awards.

Unilever’s Dove, J.C. Penney and online deals site LivingSocial.com are all launching new campaigns during ABC’s broadcast of the awards show, which is now in its 83rd year, this upcoming Sunday. The “trend” is a bit different from last year, when marketers, due to budget restraints, repurposed commercials that ran during the Super Bowl or from recent creative.

This year, however, Academy Awards advertisers are returning in full blast. So much so that commercial time for the network’s Feb. 27 live telecast of the event, commonly known as the Oscars, was completely “sold out,” per a release sent to media reporters last week.

That’s good news for ABC, marketers and consumers alike. For one, it meant the network was able to take its first major price hike in two years without (the majority of) advertisers grumbling. (A 30-second spot in the 2011 Academy Awards costs about $1.7 million.) Consumers, too, usually look forward to a good show, as advertisers, in good times past, have been known to break new creative. And, fresh off Super Bowl, marketers are hoping to attract many of the same eyeballs from this year’s live sporting event, which notched the biggest audience yet in television’s history.

At moment, the odds are in their favor. Academy Awards viewership was up 14 percent to 41.3 million last year, per Nielsen Co.

Volkswagen’s Darth Vader commercial was the top Super Bowl commercial in a ranking done by Sands Research of El Paso, which used equipment to measure brain activity and eye movement for people watching the ads.

“This is the highest scoring ad we ever tested, and we’ve had close to 1,000 ads tested over the years,” said Stephen Sands, chairman and chief science officer for the company.

A complete list of how Super Bowl commercials ranked is available on Sands Web site at www.sandsresearch.com.

Here’s the top six Super Bowl commercials, according to the Sands Research tests:

1. Volkswagen/Darth Vader
2. Paramount Pictures/Captain America movie
3. Chevrolet/Volt discovery
4. Volkswagen/Black beetle
5. Universal Pictures/Fast Five
6. Pepsi Max/Love Hurts

The three lowest-rated commercials:

67. Sealy/After glow
68. Salesforce.com-Chatter.com
69. Stella Artois/Crying jean.

Dataium, LLC, an automotive buyer behavior analytics company, today released its Promotional Impact Charts (PIC) for Super Bowl automotive advertisers. The company measured shopping, inventory search, and lead activity of over 3 million active auto shoppers during the Super Bowl, at the precise times each of the automotive manufacturers’ television spots were broadcast. The resulting statistics clearly indicate BMW’s Super Bowl commercials delivered the greatest impact for their local dealerships. It should be noted that in every instance, but Hyundai, commercials that ran prior to kickoff, generated better performance metrics for their respective local dealership websites, than those commercials that ran during the game.

As expected, the Super Bowl’s impact on overall online auto shopping was negative, with a -24% decline in shopper activity at the start of the game, but online shopping returned to pregame activity levels during halftime. After halftime activity declined dramatically, down -42% by the game’s final tick of the clock. Overall inventory search volume declined -23%, while lead volume actually increased 2.65% during the game. For the week following the Super Bowl, Monday through Saturday, all performance metrics remained down when compared to a typical non-Super Bowl week.

Consumer shopping behavior seems to be more impacted by the game itself than the ads within it. However, much of the goal of Super Bowl advertising is to build brand recognition and definition rather than generate website traffic and lead volume.

A full report of Promotional Impact Charts (PIC) for each automotive Super Bowl commercial is available upon request at dataium.com/contact. The report includes performance statistics by make and model, comparative statistics of auto buyer behavior pre-Super Bowl and post Super Bowl, as well as, keyword usage trends, and more. Custom reports are also available by request.

Read more at: Yahoo News

One of the men featured in a Visa credit card television commercial for having never missed a Super Bowl has died. He was 79.

Bob Cook had been to 44 straight Super Bowls but couldn’t make to Texas to watch his beloved Green Bay Packers defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers on Feb. 6. Instead, Cook viewed the game from his hospital bed with his wife, who decorated his room with green and gold lights.

Cook, whose obituary ends with “GO PACK GO,” died last week after a blood infection and other chronic issues, including congestive heart failure, his wife, Sarah Cook, said Monday.
She said they had their bags packed and were ready to go, but Bob Cook told his wife three days before the game that he was too ill to travel to the game.

Read more at: The New York Times and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram

On Jan. 26, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones tells the Star-Telegram of his desire to break the Super Bowl attendance record: “I think we’ve got a good chance to break the record without counting anything outside. The stadium is certified for 111,700. When we built this stadium, I had in mind being able to reach those kinds of numbers.”

Jones wanted it to be the biggest, record attendance at a Super Bowl is 130,985. Instead, Jones got a colossal failure, and made the NFL embarassed in the process. The Cowboys didn’t break the record, falling 766 short.

Read more at: AdAge
and Kantar’s press release

The verdict is in, and Volkswagen’s “The Force,” starring 6-year-old “Little Darth Vader” Max Page, won the online battle of the Super Bowl ads by a long shot, with more than 20 million views on the web, according to analytics firm Kantar Video.

No surprise here; the video had racked up 10 million views before the game began, due to some aggressive promotion by VW. Now, days after the game, VW is in another league than any other Super Bowl spot: The No. 2 campaign, Doritos’ and Pepsi Max’s “Pug Attack,” has accumulated 3.5 million views so far online and the No. 3 spot, Chrysler’s “Imported From Detroit” anthem starring Eminem, has 3.3 million views.

So what’s that worth to VW? About $538,470 in free media when benchmarked against the $3 million cost for 30 seconds of time during the Super Bowl, according to Kantar. That’s just what the impressions would cost to reach those additional people and doesn’t include the PR value from the exposure and press coverage. But it’s one way an advertiser can offset the media cost of the Super Bowl with free impressions on the web.

One could argue that those web impressions are more valuable because they represent a choice to watch, rather than a passive TV experience. “The Super Bowl laid the foundation; now they’re getting additional impressions and conversation with the audience they are targeting,” said Andrew Latzman, senior VP of research at Kantar Video.

Kantar measured 195 placements of “The Force” around the web. Combined with Volkswagen’s other Super Bowl ad, “Black Beetle,” the carmaker has earned more than $600,000 in free media so far. Viewing of the VW ad hasn’t slowed down much. YouTube is counting 26 million views on the ad as of Friday; Kantar’s tally, which included YouTube, stopped Wednesday, meaning the video has accrued at least another 6 million views since then.

But just like the views dropped off after Volkswagen’s mega-hit, so does the value of the free media. “Pug Attack” generated a little less than $100,000 in media value and “Imported From Detroit” $90,000. Overall, the top-10 Super Bowl ads on the web have generated more than $1 million in media value since the game.

The coupon site that debuted its first-ever television commercials during Super Bowl XLV last Sunday, is pulling the ads after negative reaction.

Chicago-based Groupon’s three advertisements for its “Save the Money” campaign a Hollywood star speaking somberly about a cause, then juxtaposing those statements with a pitch for a slightly related deal they got off Groupon. In one 30-second ad that aired during the Super Bowl’s third quarter, actor Timothy Hutton spoke of the plight of the Tibetan people and their culture as images of snow-capped peaks and dancing children cut away to Hutton sitting at Himalayan Restaurant in Chicago touting the fish curry.

Other ads that aired before and after the Super Bowl were similar. One featured actor Cuba Gooding Jr. talking about saving whales, who added it would be more fun to observe the mammals on a whale-watching tour using a Groupon discount. Another featured actress Elizabeth Hurley discussing the thinning of Brazil’s rainforests, only to highlight a “deforestation” deal at a Brazilian wax spa in New York City.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky has gained acclaim, attention and notoriety for its creations such as “The King” for Burger King, the anti-smoking campaign “The Truth” and “I’m a PC” for Microsoft.

Read more at: LATimes

A question popped into my mind sometime during the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday night. Around the time Usher descended from the heavens as a lip-syncing deus ex machina to save us from Fergie’s howling screech, I tried to imagine if anthropologists in the future got their hands on a tape of last night’s game.

What would they think of us?

What would they think of those spots that cost $3 million per 30 seconds? If anything, those market-researched masterpieces reflected quite a bit about our culture: We love a laugh; we love innuendo; we love it when we are in on the joke. We are addicted to technology. We love car commercials that make us proud of America. We love chimps in suits. We either cannot have fun or are testy and violent until we have alcohol. And a Pepsi Max crotch shot to a grown-up frat boy — it doesn’t get any better than that.

Some of us are postmodern and ironic, and are snobs about it. Others embrace the uncomplicated and unsophisticated, and are snobs about it too. The Super Bowl forces the two to come together. Some laugh at the joke, others are laughing at the ones laughing at the joke.

Last night’s commercials aimed both high and low. Many missed the mark or stirred the pot. Reading the Show Tracker comments on the ads, a bevy of them were racist, sexist, too violent, too stupid. But, hey, that’s what makes us buy things.

Read more at: The Detroit News

The Chevrolet Camaro Super Bowl ad raced into history as the most-watched commercial ever, according to the Nielsen Co.

About 119.6 million viewers saw the ad about two guys describing a woman’s wild ride in a silver Camaro, besting a Doritos commercial from 2010 that had 119.2 million viewers.

Read more at: SBNation

If you thought Volkswagen won the Super Bowl advertising battle with its “The Force” commercial, then you clearly are not dumb enough to be in the target demographic for Super Bowl commercials. According to USA TODAY’s Ad Meter — in which 282 adults give their real-time feedback — the top two commercials during the game were from Doritos and Bud Light. Both involved dogs, and both were mind-numbingly stupid — the key combo for success, apparently.