PepsiCos Doritos and Pepsi MAX Turn Over Unprecedented Six Super Bowl Ads to Consumers With $5 Million on the Line for Top-Ranking Spots.

PLANO, Texas, and NEW YORK, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ — Marking the fifth anniversary of the groundbreaking contest that changed the Super Bowl advertising landscape, the Doritos brand today launched the biggest, most unexpected Crash the Super Bowl yet.  With an ad contract and a $5 million payout on the line for sweeping the top three rankings of the USA TODAY Ad Meter, the contest will offer an unprecedented six :30 Super Bowl ad spots for consumer-created commercials.  Plus, this year’s contest brings the most surprising twist to date – Doritos inviting sibling brand Pepsi MAX to the program for even more chances to sweep the top spots on the Ad Meter. Each brand will air three :30 consumer-created ads during the Super Bowl XLV broadcast, Feb. 6, on FOX, leaving it up to fans to decide whether they submit Doritos ads, Pepsi MAX ads or, – for those that are especially ambitious – ads for each.

Since 2007, Doritos has aired consumer-created ads on the Super Bowl telecast that have consistently ranked within the top-five spots of the USA TODAY Ad Meter. This marks the first time PepsiCo’s Doritos and Pepsi MAX brands have partnered for a Super Bowl activation.

“Following last year’s Super Bowl, our fans wanted another shot at sweeping the top of the USA TODAY Ad Meter and challenged us to look for new ways they could demonstrate their abilities at the highest level,” said Rudy Wilson, vice president, Frito-Lay. “We answered by bringing Crash the Super Bowl back and stocking our arsenal in a way nobody expected – by partnering with Pepsi MAX to offer six spots to consumers to showcase their talents and make their dreams a reality.”

“We are excited to return to the Super Bowl this year to drive mass awareness that Pepsi MAX has Zero Calories and maximum taste through a consumer engagement program like Crash the Super Bowl.  We believe that great ideas can come from anywhere and we’re excited to give Pepsi MAX fans the chance to showcase their creative talents on one of the world’s biggest stages,” said Lauren Hobart, CMO Sparkling Beverages, PepsiCo Beverages America.   “With our colleagues at Doritos, we’re confident fans of both brands will put it all on the line this year and that the experience will help catapult their careers in many new and exciting ways.”

To help celebrate the launch of the contest, Doritos and Pepsi MAX are hosting a first-of-its-kind event today aimed at giving consumers the best possible preparation for this year’s competition.  Held in Los Angeles and available nationwide by live webcast, the event will be headlined by creative directors from two of the world’s leading ad agencies – Jeff Goodby from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Rob Schwartz from TBWA\Chiat\Day – for an exclusive behind-the-scenes discussion about creating breakthrough Super Bowl ads.  In addition, film and television star Betty White, whose Super Bowl spot became a phenomenon coming out of Super Bowl XLIV, has joined the Crash the Super Bowl team to help inspire contestants to shoot for the Super Bowl spotlight and pursue their dreams.  She will be appearing at the launch event and serving as one of the lead recruiters for this year’s contest.  Consumers can view a live webcast of the event at 1 p.m. EST/10 a.m. PST today at http://www.ustream.tv/crashthesuperbowl or a recording of the event will be available at www.crashthesuperbowl.com.

This year, participants can upload :30 commercials that share their love for Doritos tortilla chips or Pepsi MAX to www.crashthesuperbowl.com from September 27, 2010,  to November 15, 2010, to be considered for one of the coveted spots that can change the lives of Doritos and Pepsi MAX fans. To help entrants amp up their creative masterpieces, the site also houses a toolbox where Doritos and Pepsi MAX logos, product shots, music and animations are available for download and use. In addition, footage from today’s launch event also will be available on the contest website.

Ten finalist ads will be announced in January 2011 – five Doritos ads and five Pepsi MAX ads. Then it will be up to fans to vote for their favorite ads online and determine two winning Doritos spots and two winning Pepsi MAX spots.  In addition, Doritos and Pepsi MAX executives will each select a winning spot for each brand, for a total of six consumer-created spots to air during the Super Bowl XLV broadcast. Each of the 10 finalists will win $25,000 and a trip to Dallas to attend Super Bowl XLV in a private luxury suite at the game, where they will tune in to learn for the first time which ads won when they air for a worldwide audience.  Beginning today, details about the advertising challenge are available at www.crashthesuperbowl.com.

Potential grand prizing for the contest will be based on each winning ad’s ranking on the USA TODAY Ad Meter:

• $1 million will be awarded for an ad that scores the No. 1 spot on the Ad Meter

• $600,000 will be awarded for an ad that scores the No. 2 two spot on the Ad Meter

• $400,000 will be awarded for an ad that scores the No. 3 spot on the Ad Meter

If consumer-created Doritos and Pepsi MAX ads sweep the top three rankings of the USA TODAY Ad Meter, an additional $1 million bonus will be awarded to each of the three winners for a total prize giveaway of $5 million. In addition, the consumer who creates the highest-ranking Doritos or Pepsi MAX ad will win a guaranteed contract to create an additional ad for the two brands in 2011.

The USA TODAY Super Bowl Ad Meter tracks the second-by-second responses of a panel of viewers to ads during the national broadcast of the Super Bowl and ranks them favorite to least favorite.  Created in 1989, USA TODAY’s Ad Meter has been regarded as the most influential Super Bowl ad rating in the advertising industry.

Doritos tortilla chips is one of the billion-dollar brands that make up Frito-Lay North America, the $13 billion convenient foods business unit of PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP), which is headquartered in Purchase, NY.  Pepsi MAX is one of PepsiCo’s billion-dollar global brands and is part of Pepsi Americas Beverages.  To learn more about Pepsi MAX, visit the Pepsi Max tab on Pepsi’s Facebook page at: www.pepsimax.com.  To learn more about Doritos, visit its website at www.doritos.com or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DoritosUSA.

>

PepsiCo offers the world’s largest portfolio of billion-dollar food and beverage brands, including 19 different product lines that each generates more than $1 billion in annual retail sales. Our main businesses – Frito-Lay, Quaker, Pepsi-Cola, Tropicana and Gatorade – also make hundreds of other nourishing, tasty foods and drinks that bring joy to our consumers in more than 200 countries. With annualized revenues of nearly $60 billion, PepsiCo’s people are united by our unique commitment to sustainable growth, called Performance with Purpose. By dedicating ourselves to offering a broad array of choices for healthy, convenient and fun nourishment, reducing our environmental impact, and fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace culture, PepsiCo balances strong financial returns with giving back to our communities worldwide. For more information, please visit www.pepsico.com.

Contact:

Chris Kuechenmeister

Doritos

214-422-8901 cell

Chris.Kuechenmeister@pepsico.com

Melisa Tezanos

Pepsi MAX

848-702-8414 cell

melisa.tezanos@pepsico.com

SOURCE Frito-Lay

By Eriq Gardner

For the third time in the last 10 days, a commercial that aired during this year’s Super Bowl has prompted a lawsuit.

The latest targets a spot aired by Kia Motors that allegedly rips off a classic funk tune by Dyke & the Blazers called “Let a Woman Be a Woman.”

Drive-In Music Company, which says it owns the rights to the composition by Arlester Christian, is suing Kia, CBS, the NFL, ad agency David & Goliath, Ninja Tune Records and various other parties for infringing its copyright on the song. According to the complaint, the agency didn’t seek or obtain permission to use the composition or sound recording in the spot. The plaintiff is spreading the blame, taking CBS to court for airing and continuing to air the commercial and the NFL for airing the ad on its website.

Super Bowl commercials are designed to attract attention but brands who paid big bucks to be a part of this year’s extravaganza probably did not have this in mind. This month luxury goods maker Louis Vitton sued Hyundai for featuring a basketball with the company’s logo. We’ve already covered in detail Lindsay Lohan’s lawsuit against E-Trade. And let’s not forget the beef by the White Stripes against the U.S. Air Force (even though that didn’t get to court).

Here’s the latest complaint, filed yesterday in California district court by Drive-In’s attorney, Allen Hyman. And a comparison between the song and the commercial. at thresq.hollywoodreporter.com

March 03, 2010 3:25 PM

Pantsless hullabaloo in Super Bowl leads to Dockers getting three spots in NCAA tourney.

By Brian Steinberg, AdAge.com

Talk about getting caught with your pants down. After running back-to-back ads in the Super Bowl utilizing the same creative theme — people walking about without any trousers — CBS has agreed to give one of the marketers involved additional ad time to make up for the gaffe, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Dockers’ Super Bowl ad featured men traipsing about without britches, while signaling to male viewers they ought to grow up and “wear the pants.” Oddly, the ad was preceded by a commercial from online job site CareerBuilder that sported office workers taking the concept of casual Fridays to a strange extreme — walking around the workplace in their underwear. Of possible concern: The placement of the two commercials could blur distinctions in consumers’ minds.

“The fact the theme of not wearing pants is similar in both, and the fact that they ran back-to-back, would make it more confusing for consumers to remember who to attribute each piece of creative to,” said Stacey Shepatin, director of national broadcast for Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Hill Holliday.

Dockers expressed concern, according to a person familiar with the situation, so CBS has allocated the Levi, Strauss & Co. apparel brand three 30-second spots during the NCAA men’s basketball championships. CBS declined to comment, but in a statement, the network said, “The feedback we received from the client was that they were pleased with the ad’s performance.” A spokeswoman for CareerBuilder did not return phone calls seeking comment

Executives at Dockers “were somewhat disappointed that we ran immediately after the CareerBuilder spot, given the visuals were similar, though we definitely felt the spots were very different,” said Jennifer Sey, vice president of global marketing, for Dockers.

Ms. Sey declined to comment on whether CBS offered new ad inventory in exchange for the Super Bowl placement. While the company is happy with results from the Super Bowl advertising, she said, “the agreements we made with our network advertising partner are confidential, but we are constantly in discussion with the network about strategies. Those discussions are ongoing.”

A hullabaloo over doffed pantaloons in a Super Bowl spot seems out of place, but the emergence of one sheds light on some of the arcane practices surrounding the running of TV commercials. TV networks deliberately screen commercials for outsize claims, unproven allegations against competitors, decency standards and other criteria. But they rarely make certain the theme and creative elements in one are completely different from others that may air in the same commercial break.

Instead, TV networks usually take care not to place ads from rivals in the same ad break. Ads hyping Coke and Pepsi products never run near each other, for example, nor do ads for cereals from Kellogg and General Mills. Networks take particular pains to avoid placing ads from rival car makers in proximity to each other, though sometimes the addition of commercials from local stations, often rife with spots from regional dealerships, makes the task extremely difficult to accomplish.

Trying to weed out ads with similar creative ideas might be an insurmountable task. Would viewers get confused by consecutive ads featuring any number of usual-suspect ad elements such as animated characters, dissatisfied housewives or ditzy frat boys? Are there enough commercials in existence today that don’t use these elements that could be used to buffer those that do?

“I don’t know of any specific policy that talks about [creative themes] being separated,” said Hill Holliday’s Ms. Shepatain. “Most of it is by category separation. My guess is that, in this situation, [CBS] looked at a job-market category versus an apparel category and said, ‘It shouldn’t be a problem.’”

For its part, Dockers said the Super Bowl ad was a success, based on measures it has for increases in numbers of “fans” the brand has on Facebook and followers on Twitter; number of searches via Google around the time the ad aired on TV; and traffic to its website, among other factors, said Ms. Sey. “These, to us, are signals that our consumers were engaged,” she said. “We’re really pleased with sales we are starting to see in the dot-com space.”

If Dockers did receive additional ad inventory in exchange for its Super Bowl placement, the move is not in keeping with typical TV-network procedure. Networks will give additional ad time, also known as “make-goods,” to clients when the shows they ran ads in fell short of predetermined ratings guarantees. CBS’s broadcast of Super Bowl shattered viewership records, drawing 106.5 million people, according to Nielsen, beating the network’s 1983 airing of the season finale of M*A*S*H.

The cost of a 30-second ad in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament typically runs several hundreds of thousands of dollars to more than $1 million, depending on the proximity of the advertising to the championship games. Meanwhile, CBS sought between $2.5 million and $3 million for a 30-second ad in this year’s Super Bowl broadcast.

via crainsnewyork.com

For Immediate Release

sands research annouces results of neuromarketing study ranking

effectiveness of 2010 super bowl commercials

 

This Year’s Most Engaging Include Volkswagen and Google Advertisements;

Past Top Spots Have Achieved Considerable Future Success

February 24, 2010 – El Paso, TX – Leading neuromarketing firm Sands Research announced today that it has completed its annual study gauging the effectiveness of Super Bowl commercials. The 2010 results were compiled using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and eye-tracking data gathered from study participants. 

“Our technology measures engagement millisecond by millisecond and is the only to reflect frame by frame changes in emotion. Volkswagen’s ‘Punch Dub’ was our top scorer this year with a commercial that engaged viewers in virtually all of the frames,” stated Dr. Stephen Sands, Chairman and Chief Science Officer at Sands Research. “The company turned viewers into ‘Volkswagen detectors’ by having them look for and anticipate the cars – VW really maximized their entire 30 seconds.” Dr. Sands also noted that Google’s “Parisian Love” advertisement used an engaging storyline to elicit a consistent, deep emotional response from viewers.

Using its proprietary Neuro Engagement Factor (NEF)™, the company ranked these spots and  61 other commercials. The top ads and their respective scores are as follows:

#1: Volkswagen – Punch Dub/Deutsch – Los Angeles (4.71)

#2: Vizio – Forge/Venables, Bell and Partners – San Francisco (3.96)

#3: Budweiser – Bridge/DDB – Chicago (3.91)

#4: Google – Parisian/Google Creative Lab (3.80)

#5: Bridgestone – Whale of a Tail/Richards Group – Dallas (3.71)

“Rankings based on ‘free recall’ only test how easily a commercial is remembered and as a result fail to provide substantive feedback,” said Dr. Sands. “By conducting neuromedia analysis based on EEG readings rather than recall or more unreliable instant analysis peripheral measures such as heart rate, we are able to effectively determine the dimensions on which commercials are engaging viewers, and also an ad’s chance for success.”

Indeed, past results have proved strong indicators of future achievement – three out of the top five commercials identified in the 2009 Sands Research Super Bowl study went on to receive nominations for the coveted Creative Arts Emmy Award. This included Coca-Cola’s “Heist” spot which won the Emmy for “Outstanding Commercial” after taking Sands Research’s top ranking.

Full rankings, videos of the highest scoring 2010 Super Bowl commercials, and past year’s results are available at http://www.sandsresearch.com/SBXLIVMain.aspx.

Members of the press may obtain expanded information and results by contacting J.Todd Smith by email at: todd@thelongitude.com or by phone at 917-328-1156. All others may contact info@sandsresearch.com or call 888-267-6087 Ext. 812.

About Sands Research Inc.

Sands Research Inc. (www.sandsresearch.com) is a pioneer in applying cognitive neuroscience technology for unique insight into the consumer’s response to television and print advertisements, product packaging and digital media. Combined with pre- and post- questionnaires, the Company provides a comprehensive, objective analysis of the viewer’s engagement in the marketing material being presented by an advertiser.

 

The results are in from the Wired Biometric Super Bowl Party, and 25 of our readers’ autonomic nervous systems have selected their top 10 advertisements.

The Google ad that had everyone talking after the game got the attention of our party goers as well, but the real winner was a surprise. It turns out our readers are even geekier than we thought.

The study, conducted by Boston-based research firm Innerscope, was held at Wired HQ in San Francisco with participants from across the state and as far away as Sweden. These guinea pigs had their skin conductance, heart rate and movements measured to see how they responded physiologically to the motley assortment of Super Bowl ads.

The company’s algorithms translate those measurements into a single metric they call “engagement.” While the researchers are obviously looking for spikes in people’s excitement — heart rate increases, etc — the best ads also generate consistent body movements and attention to the ad. (Read more about the science in “How Your Biometrics Can Make Super Bowl Ads Better.”)

 

What’s fun about this technology is that you can see people’s reactions in real time, which you couldn’t with traditional advertising scoring techniques. The downside is it takes some time to crunch the data, which is why you’re reading this now instead of the day after the game. But as the old aphorism goes, slow and data-rich wins the race.

In the videos below, engagement is charted on the graphs, so you can see it moving up and down as the ads roll. On the Innerscope scale, getting up near 90 is impressive. The peak moment they measured was (of course) Tracy Porter’s fourth-quarter interception of Peyton Manning and the long return for a touchdown that followed. It hit over 122 on the engagement scale.

“It may be the highest-ever score for Innerscope and there are some obvious reasons why that might be,” said Carl Marci, a social psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Innerscope co-founder.

One funny quirk about this year’s Super Bowl ads: none of them beat the two NBC promotional spots for The Late Show With David Letterman and How I Met Your Mother. If we included them on the commercial list, they would have ranked one and two. Go figure. Maybe all that Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno controversy was good for the late-night talk-show-host business.

In a surprise, the Electronic Arts ad for the upcoming game Dante’s Inferno topped the list. If you needed more evidence that Wired readers are geeky, take the fact that they liked an ad for a videogame better than any of the beer commercials.

There aren’t a lot of noticeable peaks and valleys for this ad, unlike some of the others. People most just stayed tuned in and watched the whole thing.

“Like a movie trailer, the ad is the product,” Marci explained.

But why this ad and why this game, which at least to this writer, seem kind of mediocre?

“With the Dante’s Inferno ad, people probably weren’t thinking ‘This is going to be the greatest game of all time,’ but it would have been very hard for them to ignore,” said Innerscope senior scientist, Caleb Siefert. “Definitely people in that audience are going to have an opinion of the game.”

Coming in at number five, we see Google’s first Super Bowl ad. When it came on, a hush fell over the room as people watched to see how their search engine would make a commercial.

“We didn’t rate Google as the number one ad, but when you look at the trace, it’s absolutely amazing,” Siefert said.

Throughout the commercial, we stay at one time scale quickly progressing through a cute love story between some American dude and a Parisian lady. Then, right at the end, the ad’s time scale speeds up and soon the searcher is looking for information on how to assemble a crib.

“What I loved about the Google ad, it was one of the best stories told,” Marci said. “It’s so tight and hangs together so well and then reminds you of the product that delivered this story so effectively.”

Then, Google’s “branding moment” hits as the words “Search on” come on the screen. People loved it.

“I’m blown away by the slope of the line in the branding moment, how sharply it goes up,” Siefert said.

And finally, we get to the ad in which a Doritos samurai with Doritos nunchuks attacks some unsuspecting faux hipsters who are for some reason eating Doritos in the gym. What you see in the numbers here is a classic joke that works. It starts off kind of fun, lulls you for a minute as the action plays out, and then bam — the punchline.