The hype is intense. Will the Gloved One cameo?

By Diego Vasquez
MediaLife.com
Jan 31, 2008


Last year the big buzz entering the Super Bowl was about Nationwide’s spot featuring aspiring rapper Kevin Federline, Britney Spears’ ex-husband, winking at his reputation as a hanger-on. This year another Spears ex, Justin Timberlake, is garnering lots of prekickoff attention for his Super Bowl ad. It features the Grammy winner performing gravity-defying stunts like jumping off moving cars to help introduce a new Pepsi program offering Amazon.com MP3 downloads. The spot has gotten buzz not just because of the stunts but also because it marks Timberlake’s first Super Bowl presence since 2004’s Nipplegate, when Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast during the halftime show. In fact, yesterday word even leaked that Jackson’s brother, Michael, may cameo in a Pepsi ad. Other spots receiving pregame buzz include the Budweiser Clydesdale spot, which uses a “Rocky” theme to show a horse trying to make the Anheuser-Busch team. SpotBowl, the Super Bowl commercial voting web site and blog run by Harrisburg, Pa., agency Pavone, says the Clydesdale spot has a great chance of winning public opinion polls come Monday, the day after the game. David Shoffner, SpotBowl spokesperson and public relations strategist at Pavone, talks to Media Life about which ads are getting buzz, why simply advertising in the game isn’t enough, and why SalesGenie.com is trying to make a bad ad.  


Aside from Bud Light, which always generates loads of pregame publicity, which spots are getting the most hype?

We’re not seeing the same level of hype that some of the consumer-generated spots did last year.

We’re also not seeing anything that comes close to the pre-game buzz that Nationwide’s Kevin Federline spot received, but we are hearing some talk and excitement around Pepsi’s Justin Timberlake ad.

We’re also hearing great things in certain circles about Anheuser-Busch’s 60-second Clydesdale spot this year. That one is going to combine the right amount of sentiment and humor, and we expect it to be the favorite to win a poll like SpotBowl.


What sort of boost can advertisers expect for their product following a Super Bowl ad? Is it more about product recognition or driving actual sales?

A spot can make people laugh or recite a catch phrase around the water cooler the next day. But if people don’t remember the brand name or the product, the company has essentially wasted $2.7 million.

These days advertisers can’t let the Super Bowl spot stand alone. They have to support it with pre-game marketing campaigns and tie the spot into a larger, overall marketing effort in order to really maximize their investment.


Studies have shown that movies running trailers during the Super Bowl tend to draw huge grosses. Is that simply a matter of studios putting their best prospects in the game, or is there a Super Bowl effect at the box office?

The types of movies we see advertised in the Super Bowl are pre-destined to be blockbusters, so it’s unlikely that the Super Bowl has too much effect on overall ticket sales.


Go Daddy once again claimed to have a provocative ad denied by Super Bowl censors, something that seems to happen each year. How much free publicity does it reap from this move?

In the first few years it worked really well for them, and it still does. A big part of maximizing your investment--especially for a company like GoDaddy, who doesn’t have a big advertising budget like Coke or Budweiser--is getting people to talk about your ad before and after the game.


Your blog reports that SalesGenie.com is purposely trying for another poorly reviewed ad, after actually gaining buzz last year because its spot was so poor. What's your opinion of that strategy?

It should be interesting.

They’re obviously going after the buzz factor again, and there’s always equity in creating a spot that stands in contrast to the rest of the pack, whether it’s a serious spot amongst a bunch of humor (in the case of the White House anti-drug message this year) or a bad ad among the best of the best.


Last year's big trend in Super Bowl advertising was user-generated content. What will this year's be?

This year we’re seeing more advertisers using the internet as a bridge between the TV spot, the brand and the consumer, from online contests to determine the brand’s Super Bowl ad content, to teaser campaigns prior to the game, to entire web sites (in the case of BudBowl.com) dedicated to a company’s Super Bowl ads.  


So who's going to win the game?

I always bet on Bud. They’re able to combine humor and sentiment every year and always have four or five spots in the top 10. This year I’m looking forward to their 60-second Clydesdale spot. I’ve talked to a representative from Anheuser-Busch recently and they agree that spot is their strongest contender this year.

As far as the football teams … gotta go with the Patriots.  

This Year’s Super Bowl Ads to Be Gentle and Sweet
                      
E*Trade Financial has two Super Bowl commercials that will feature a baby talking on a Webcam about stocks and savings.

By STUART ELLIOTT
New York Times
January 31, 2008

NO matter how rough the action gets on the field on Sunday, when the New England Patriots meet the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII, the advertisers will be playing nice.

Most commercials that Fox Broadcasting will run during the game — for which sponsors are paying record prices or close to it — will be taking a milder, sweeter approach. There will be cute animals, at least one talking baby, an appeal to help fight AIDS, a talent contest, light-hearted parodies and enough celebrities to fill several seasons of “Dancing With the Stars.”

“So many advertisers are promising to show their soft, friendly side,” said Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at Cymfony, a research company that is part of the TNS Media Intelligence unit of Taylor Nelson Sofres. “Maybe it’s because people are getting their fill of blood and guts in political advertising.”

The tone of the 40 or so Super Bowl spots, along with related campaigns online and in stores, will be in marked contrast to the commercials shown during the Super Bowl last year. Many of those drew complaints for slapstick, cartoonish violence that was deemed crass or even callous.

The misbehavior in the spots for Super Bowl XLI included a bank robbery, a monster run amok, a man throwing a rock at another man’s head, fights among office workers, people slapping each other across the face and men tearing out patches of chest hair.

Some of that bad behavior was out of this world — literally. In a commercial for FedEx, set on the moon, an astronaut was obliterated by a meteor.

•

By contrast, there will be “no dying this year,” David Lubars, the creative leader at the FedEx agency, said about the spot the company plans for Sunday.

“We have several commercials that are all fun and nice,” said Mr. Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO North America, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group.

The commercials include, in addition to FedEx, spots for PepsiCo beverages like Amp Energy and Diet Pepsi Max as well as a commercial featuring the singer Justin Timberlake “having a lot of fun with himself and his reputation,” Mr. Lubars said, on behalf of Pepsi Stuff, a music promotion sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and Amazon.com.

“I don’t know that it’s a conscious decision,” Mr. Lubars said, referring to the shift to sunnier ads from darker ones. “Maybe people got tired of those jokes, or they ran their course.”

“Or maybe it’s where the zeitgeist is, particularly with tough financial times now,” he added. “Maybe people want something lighter and less aggressive.”

That theory was echoed by David Ovens, chief marketing officer at Taco Bell, a division of Yum Brands that plans to run a commercial in which consumers offer a humorous “¡Hola!” to a new menu item, Fiesta Platters.

“Some of the advertising last year was a bit aggro,” Mr. Ovens said, using British slang for aggressive. The goal of Taco Bell and its Interpublic Group agency, Draft FCB, in developing the Fiesta Platters spot was to create something “engaging, but not in your face.”

“The in-your-face slapstick stuff is funny, but then you forget about it,” Mr. Ovens said. “Funny with a wink, with a twist, people will talk about it.”

Talk value — or “Monday morning chatterbacking,” to borrow a phrase from Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president at Nielsen Online Strategic Services — is more important than ever.

That is because almost every Super Bowl advertiser wants its commercial to be amusing or intriguing enough to encourage viewers to watch it again after the game, on Web sites like AOL, MySpace, Yahoo and YouTube. They also hope viewers will forward video clips of the spot to friends, search for terms like “Super Bowl commercials” on sites like Google and visit special online microsites.

The Pepsi/Amazon promotion will have such a site at pepsistuff.com; another, truthinengineering.com, will pitch the Audi R8 sold by the Audi division of Volkswagen of America (which is inspiring a parody of “The Godfather” in a commercial created by Venables Bell & Partners).

“No one just buys a spot anymore; it’s about extending beyond,” said Penry Price, vice president for North American advertising sales at Google.

For instance, not only do consumers start to search for Super Bowl spots on YouTube before the game, Mr. Price said, but there is also significant viewing afterward. Last year, the site had considerable commercial-viewing traffic for 38 days after Super Bowl XLI, he said, from more than 28 million computer users.

Read the rest of the article HERE!

I'm most curious about the possibility of viewing the big Ads here in Canada..I'm a Shaw Cable subscriber with a brand new HD cable box, nearest big city is Edmonton....any suggestions?

Supabowel is this weekend? who cares...

I've got some of the early leaked commercials up on my blog:

http://www.buzzbishop.com/blog/2008/01/31/superbowl-commercials-leaked/

The CRTC gets so many queries about "the commercials" each year, they've posted  a FAQ on the topic.  Tod Maffin of the CBC explains:

http://todmaffin.com/superbowlads

Enjoy, ladies.
bz.

Quoted from pattishea

I'm most curious about the possibility of viewing the big Ads here in Canada..I'm a Shaw Cable subscriber with a brand new HD cable box, nearest big city is Edmonton....any suggestions?

Somewhere in your digital world you should be able to find four US network stations from Detroit.  They are free for all digital subscribers in Victoria, locally on cable channels 83-86.  The cable company doesn't do 'program substitution' on this tier because the majority of the programming appears 2-3 hours earlier than our local stations, so you should get an unimpeded US feed of the game on the Fox station (which is actually in Rochester, not Detroit.)  That's been my experience in past years, at any rate.

I don't know about HD, though.

Thank you boredop, I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I understand the concept behind signal substitution. I don't think anyone faults the Canadian network that carries the Super Bowl and, having paid whatever large amount for the rights, attempts to recoup it costs by selling ads in the game cast to Canadian advertisers. The unfortunate side effect is that several of the big budget spots by American advertisiers (i.e. Budweiser) get blacked out. But what I'd like to see is some of the larger Canadian advertisers  invest in new creative and produce special ads for Super Bowl, like they do down south. Memo to Rona, Tim Hortons & Canadian Tire: when you run the same tired old spots in the Super Bowl that you've already been using for 3 months, we don't watch. That's when we go get another beer or use the bathroom.