We were watching the Super Bowl on Sunday, and moments after the E*Trade commercial started (it featured a baby talking about stock trading like a slacker dude), my wife said to me "oh, it would be so funny if he puked."
And then he did!
Hahahahahahaha.
It was truly hilarious. The other spot, with the clown in the background because the kid splurged with some "extra coin," was equally funny.
For fellow Dim Bulbers, this won't come as a surprise, but I question the lasting merits of such marvelous spots. They got our attention, and were favorably reviewed in the media that track such things, but a week or month from now? Will reviews or our experiences of humor, creativity, production values, or other qualities have any bearing on the brands that paid for the exposure during the game?
Hahahahahaha...er...no.
I've been told the argument for using mascots or other non-functionally-relevant branding to differentiate commodity offerings, and I think I buy it, sort of. In insurance, there's Geico's lizard, Aflac's duck, and Churchill's bulldog. In hamburgers, there's a clown, a king, and a freaky guy in red pigtails.
Mention insurance or burgers, and if I happen to be looking for either at that very moment, I might recall one character or another. And it might prompt me to look for more information about one company over another. Maybe.
But would it make me choose one product over another? What if I got to thinking about insurance a few weeks or months after the spots aired...would I not only remember the spot(s), but would they influence my behavior? And what if I don't like ducks or talking babies? Could the spots deter as many inquiries as they hoped to prompt?
Maybe Super Bowl spots aren't so much branding as much as awareness-generating. They're ads, pure and simple. A puking baby doesn't necessarily communicate confidence (or anything else particularly relevant) when it comes to trading stocks; you just get a chuckle and keep the spots top-of-mind for the brief period after you see them.
Branding it's not.
Advertisers are relying on the reach and influence of an after-image. Every time we blink, the value of the spots recedes further into the noise of all the other things...many far more important....that we forget, discard, or sorta missed along the way.
Actually, it's even worse than that.
When it comes to favorite Super Bowl ads, like notable mascots, you tend to remember the joke or spokeswhatever, and not the product or service. Because there's no real connection between the character...or the humor...and the brand, the advertising amounts to little more than the creative corollary of a loud noise in a crowded room. You turn your head, even if you don't know why.
And that noise, like the visual after-images, starts dissolving into background static before the game even ends.
No matter how many movie review-like reviews of the spots clutter up the business media this week, it kinda doesn't really matter, does it? If the Super Bowl was the chance to 1) reach a gigantic audience, and 2) tell them something they would remember for all of a few hours, then why do we analyze the spots like they're mini-movies?
They're prompts and, as such, they're an opportunity to:
- Get viewers to do something. The puking baby didn't make me go the the E*Trade site; none of the spots did, except for the GoDaddy promise of watching that racer girl unzip her top (and then wasted the effort by 1) not delivering, and 2) making us watch a commercial based on a base double entendre that wasn't even remotely funny). Think of how much more impactful (and measurable) the spot would have been if it gave a reason...discount, info, vote, whatever...to go to the URL? Or maybe it could have been a phone call or SMS. The movie-reviews wouldn't have celebrated the spot this week, but real web traffic (or other behavior, like visiting a store) could have delivered responses that are far more valuable
- Associate doing something the the product. Imagine if, instead of trying to attach some creative nonsense to a product, marketers instead endeavored to attach a product to some common, repeat behavior. This is a bad execution, but why not have a spot that connected saving money on E*Trade with, say, scratching your nose, or opening a door. Then, there might be some real hope of prompting useful behavior every time those instances occurred in the lives of viewers.
It really doesn't matter that I thought the E*Trade spots were hilarious.
it would have matter far more if I'd done something instead of just laugh.
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