Hi, it’s me again. Did you watch the Super Bowl? No offense to the Pats, but it’s about time they got toppled, especially after what they did to my Atlanta Falcons last year. If anybody was going to beat the Falcons, I’m OK that it was the Eagles. You gotta like Nick Foles, right? And after they went for it on the fourth down on the one-yard line, I think we all felt they wanted it more than the Pats.
But, um, what I’m really asking is if you watched the Super Bowl commercials. Not a ridiculous question since when else can you see so many of the priciest, most highly produced spots of the year? Except now that the advertisers know everybody watches their commercials, they release them online ahead of time so we can see them more than once.
One reason we all love the Super Bowl is that it isn’t just a battle of football. It’s also a battle of ads. The audience is huge and not going anywhere. With so many captive eyes and ears, some advertisers blow their whole budget in that one night. This year the average price of a 30-second spot was $5,500,000, and that’s just what NBC made. Production was on top of that.
So, did the spots live up to the hype? Were the impressions worth the cost? Three big surveys took the pulse of viewers to find out. One of the surveys, taken the morning after, had marketing pros also rate their effectiveness.
Each of the three polls measured differently. In the USA Today Ad Meter poll, the people picked their top five favorites based on likability. In the Ad Age Super Bowl Ad Rank With Morning Consult, advertising and marketing pros picked their top 55 out of 83 based on entertainment and brand effectiveness. And in The Top Ten Digital Ads by Share of Voice, Ad Age partnered with iSpot.tv to measure more than 7 million smart TVs for digital ad sharing to determine the ten spots most shared and engaged with.
So, who won? The Eagles won 41-33, but which spots won? Well, the people and the pros picked “Alexa Loses Her Voice.” But in digital sharing Alexa ranked #2, with the top spot going to the indescribably weird battle between fire and ice in “Doritos Blaze and Mountain Dew Ice Part 1.”
When we polled three males and two females in our office, only one of us put Alexa in the top spot. Doritos and Mountain Dew got another top vote. Both from male voters. One of our female voters went for Budweiser’s “Stand By You.” She said it almost made her want to drink a Bud.
Our other female voter went for “Human,” featuring Danny DeVito as a red M&M turned into a short chubby loser dressed head to toe in red repeatedly asking people if they wanted to eat him. This blog is G-rated, so no comment there. What do women see in that little guy anyway?
And me? By now, you must know I’m a football fanatic. So, how could I resist Eli Manning and Odell Beckham Jr. having the time of their lives dirty dancing? I had to pick the NFL spot “Touchdown Celebrations to Come.”
So, how did we compare with the official polls? Keep in mind that the people’s poll only picked the top 5, digital share of voice the top 10 and the pros the top 55.
Obviously, our male voter who picked Alexa was in the majority. The other male voter who picked the Doritos spot was in line with the share of digital voice poll, which ranked it #1 and with the people, who ranked it #4, and the pros, who gave it a 10.
Of our female office mates’ choices, the Bud spot ranked #5 with the pros, #3 with the people and #8 in digital share of voice. And the red M&M-turned-pudgy-little-human ranked #6 with the people and #13 with the pros but didn’t make the top ten in the digital polls. I told you Danny DeVito is a girl thing. Are females less into sharing commercials than guys? Maybe we need another poll on that.
And the football legends dirty dancing? It was #2 with the people, #4 with the pros and #3 in digital share of voice. Go me!
So, what do our choices say about us? Generally speaking, entertainment rules. So do humor, quirkiness and concern for others. Overt selling is out. Features and benefits are dead. The good news is that as Americans, we still love good advertising. Creativity in our profession is alive and well.
If you have a project that needs some creative thinking, creative thinking is what we do. Get in touch with us here.
Cheers!
Buzz
