A couple of days ago, I received my daily AdAge newsletter, and it included a link to this survey, which asked about whether or not pre-Super Bowl buzz for advertisements during the game was down. After seeing it, I immediately pinged Chris Thilk, and he responded with the same resounding (if anything can be resounding on IM) affirmative that I had thought in my own head. I’ve gotta say, it was strange to me that buzz had actually dropped down this year – and no, I’m not kidding.
The funny thing about marketing during a bad economic time is that you don’t stop doing it. Sure, you might make a point to make those dollars “go further” than they might have during a less risky time, but you still do it. Did NBC land some pretty good ads that cost millions of dollars to place during the game? Most certainly. Did anyone do a truly outrageous job of sharing those ads with bloggers and the public in advance of the game as they had done (with great success, if you ask me – and yes, I’m biased, having done this for a couple of years prior to this one) in years past? Nope, well that’s not totally true. I’d say the movie industry did a bang up job, but that’s about it.
Why would it work this way this year? My first inclination is that companies, especially some that had been heavily criticized for taking private jets to government hearings, for one, wanted to take a low(er) profile. Others, such as perennial USA Today Ad Meter winner Anheuser-Busch did indeed place their ads online, but I certainly didn’t see the almost two weeks of buzz about specific ads that I’d seen the previous two years. Of course, I was super close to it as the aforementioned Mr. Thilk and I had been a part of the work surrounding ad previews for the company during the 2007 and 2008 Super Bowl seasons. Was A-B’s merger with InBev part of a change in strategy around the game? One industry executive Larry Novenstern, executive vp, director of national electronic media at Optimedia made such a suggestion that if it hasn’t started happening, it could in the future in a recent ADWEEK article.
Now again, I have some understanding of the “cost” – and I mean that in dollars and sense, along with time spent – of creating some buzz about your efforts around something like the Super Bowl, and in a time when you’re cutting back on other things, the fact of the matter is that most social media efforts continue to be relatively inexpensive compared to other public relations / marketing efforts. And, if during that same timeframe, you’re aware of possible criticism of your strategy changes and how shareholders might react (buying less ads sounds good at face value, but if the continued support through branding / advertising of major events were to add value or create a baseline for your brand’s worth in the community, sometimes those dollars saved might not pay off long term).
But what does it all mean? It’s not certainly as easy as just picking a brand or two and saying “howcome they didn’t get some branding?” It was just a couple of years ago that it was a GOAL to get people to talk about your whole ad, punchline and all, and now we’re not even generating buzz at all, until two or three days before the game? To me, it seems like such an easy mark to go after starting this discussion a couple weeks out. Two weeks out, the NFC/AFC championship games are finished, and there’s a whole week (some would argue two, even counting media week at the Super Bowl) of nothing but “my team is better than your team” on sports radio going on, especially within the football set. Why not take advantage of that?
I could go on with this post, but instead I’ll just stick to that last question – why not take advantage of that?
