Why Twitter Won the SuperBowl While Traditional Ad Execs Don’t Get It

by | Feb 5, 2013 | Current Affairs, Food and Drink, Innovation, Leadership, Sports, Television

Reading reviews of Super Bowl ads I was struck by two observations:

  1. The reviewers got the value of most ads backwards
  2. They missed the most important ad of all – on Twitter

Super Bowl ads cost $1M+ to make.  Then they cost $2M+ to air.  So it is an expensive proposition.  This isn't fine art, like a Picasso, with a long shelf life to create a rate of return.  These ads need to pay off fast.  They need to build the brand with existing and/or new customers to drive sales and make back that money now.

So let's start with one of the best reviewed ads – Chrysler's "God Made a Farmer". Reviewers liked the home-spun approach of using a dead conservative radio commentator voicing over pictures of farmers in pick-ups.  Unfortunately, from a rate of return perspective my bet is this ad will end up near the very bottom.  

  • Firstly, the 50 year trend is to urbanization.  In 1900 9 out of 10 Americans had something to do with agriculture.  Now it is fewer than 1 in 20.  Trucks are used for lots of things, but farming makes up a small percentage.  It has been a full generation since most 2nd generation Americans had anything to do with a farm.  Showing people using a product in ways that almost nobody uses it, and with a message most of your target market doesn't even recognize, leaves most people confused rather than ready to buy.
  • Secondly, first generation Americans are changing the demographics of America quickly.  First generation Americans (can I say immigrant?) proved large enough, and powerful enough, to play a spoiler role in Mitt Romney's run for the Presidency.  To them, farming in America has no history, appeal or meaning to their lives. 
  • Thirdly, no one under the age of 35 has any idea who Paul Harvey is.  Perhaps Chrysler could have used Bill O'Reilly and achieved its message mission.  But as it was, there were two of us +50 people who spent 5 minutes trying to tell the group watching the game at my home who Paul Harvey even was – and why he was being quoted.

A 24 year old boy watching the game with me in suburban Chicago listened to my explanation about Paul Harvey and farming.  He drives a Ford F-250 4×4 pick-up.  After I finished he looked me square in the eyes and said "Swing, and a miss."  And that's what I'd say to Chrysler.  Whoever made this ad had more money than market research and common sense.

Simultaneously, reviewers hated GoDaddy.com's "Perfect Match, Bar Rafieli's Big Kiss." This portrayed a very stereotypical engineer enjoying a long kiss with a pretty girl – referring to how the company's products well serve client needs.  Reviewers found the ad in bad taste.  My bet is this ad will have immediate payback for GoDaddy.com

Have you ever heard of the monstrously successful situation comedy "The Big Bang Theory?"  At just about any time you can find this in reruns on at least one, if not more than one, cable channel.  The show is so successful that to pull people viewers to its Monday night schedule CBS actually chose to rerun "Big Bang" episodes amidst new episodes of its other programs in January.  The show thrives on the tension of male technical professionals seeking to solve the age old question of how a man can appeal to desirable ladies.  Politically correct or not, the show is successful because it is a timeless message.  Most boys want to be liked by girls.

Today the world of people who have technical, or quasi-technical jobs, is HUGE.   GoDaddy's target audience of people buying, and servicing, web domains just happens to be mostly male under-40 men with technical or quasi-technical backgrounds.  This little, tasteless demonstration may have upset the high ethics of ad execs (or has "Mad Men" unraveled that myth?) but to its target group this ad was pure gold.  And same for GoDaddy.com.

But most importantly, none of these ads will have the payback of 9 words a marketer tweeted when the lights went out at the game.  Because it had blown a huge wad of money on a traditional game ad the Oreo brand folks at Mondelez were watching the game with their media agency 360i.  Thinking quickly the creatives came up with an idea, and the brand guys approved it – so out went the tweet from Oreo Cookies "No problem.  You can still dunk in the dark."

"Booya" as my young friends say.  10,000 retweets and an entire Monday news cycle devoted to the quick thinking folks who posted this tweet.  ROI?  Given that the incremental cost was zero, pretty darn high. If I was investing, I'd take the tweet over the video.  The equivalent of a kick return for a TD.

The world has changed.  We now live in a 24×7, real-time, always-on world.  We no longer wait for the weekly magazine for analysis, or the daily newspaper for information.  Or even the 11:00 television daily recap.  We pick up alerts on our mobile devices constantly.  Receive highlights from friends on Facebook and Twitter.  We want our information NOW.  And those who connect to this new way of living for providing us information are not only accepted, but admired by those thriving on the social networks.

This year's Super Bowl social media postings were triple last year's; over 30million.  This is the world of immediate feedback.  Immediate discussion.  And the place were ads need to be immediate as well.  Those who understand this, and connect to it, will succeed.  Others, who spend too much to make and then distribute ads on traditional media, will not.  Just as newspaper ads have lost of their relevance – TV ads are destined for the same conclusion.

The good news is that Mondelez and its Oreos team was ready, and willing, to take advantage.  Where were most of the other advertisers?  Audi, VW and P&G's Tide also jumped in.  But of all those millions spent on once-run ads, these major corporate advertisers – and their extremely highly paid ad agencies – were absent.  When the easy money was to be made, they simply weren't there.  Off drinking beer and watching the game when they should have been working!

Today we learned Twitter is buying Bluefin to make its information on who is tweeting, about what, in real time even better.  This will be helpful for any smart advertiser.  And not just the multi-billion dollar giants.  The good news is anyone, anywhere in any size company can play in this real-time, on-line social media world.  You don't have to be huge, or rich. 

Where were you when the lights went out?  Were you taking advantage of what we may later call a "once in a lifetime" opportunity? 

Where will you be the next time?  Are you ready to invest in the new world of social media advertising?   Or are you stuck spending too much to come in too late?

Forced innovation – Consumer goods and retail,

by | Jun 26, 2009 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, Disruptions, In the Swamp, Innovation, Leadership

"Retailers cut back on variety, once the spice of marketing" is the Wall Street Journal.com headline.  It seems one of the unintended consequences of this recession will be forced consumer goods innovation!

For years consumer goods companies, and the retailers which push their products, have played a consistent, largely boring, and not too profitable Defend & Extend game.  When I was young there was one jar of Kraft Miracle whip on the store shelf.  It was one quart.  This container was so ubiquitous that it coined the term "mayonnaise jar" – everybody knew what you meant with that term.  Now you can find multiple varieties of Miracle Whip (fat free, low fat, etc.), in multiple sizes.  This product proliferation passed for innovation for many people.  Unfortunately, it has not grown the sales of Miracle Whip faster than growth in the general population. 

Do you remember when you'd go to Pizza Hut and they offered "Hawaiian Pizza?"  Pizza Hut would concoct some pretty unusual toppings, mixed up in various arrangements, then give them catchy labels.  Unfortunately, what passed internally as an exciting new product introduction was recognized by customers as much ado about nothing, and those varieties quietly and quickly left the menu.  Like the Miracle Whip example, it expanded the number of choices, but it did not increase the demand for pizza, nor revenues, nor profits.

Expanding varieties is too often seen by marketers as innovation.  I remember when Oreos came out with 100 calorie packs, and the CEO said that was an innovation.  But did it drive additional Oreo sales?  Unfortunately for Nabisco, no.  It was plenty easy to count out the number of cookies you want and put in a baggie.  Or buy fewer cookies altogether in these new, smaller packages.

These sorts of tricks are the stock-in-trade of Defend & Extend management.  Clog up the distribution system with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of varieties of your product.  Try to take over lots of shelf space by paying "stocking fees" to the retailer to put all those varieties (package sizes, flavor options, etc.) on his shelf – in effect bribing him to stock the product.  But then when a truly new product comes along, something really innovative by a smaller, newer company, the D&E manager uses the stocking fees as a way to make it hard for the new product to even reach the market because the small company can't afford to pay millions of dollars to bump the big guy defending his retail turf.  The large number of offerings defends the product's position in retail, while simultaneously extending the product's life to keep sales from declining.  But, year after year the cost of creating, launching and placing these new varieties of largely the "same old thing" keeps driving down the net margin.  The D&E manager is trying to keep up revenues, but at the expense of profits. 

Simultaneously, this kind of behavior keeps the business from launching really new products.  The previous CEO at Kraft said in 2006 that the best investment his company could make was advertising Velveeta.  His point of view was that protecting Velveeta sales was worth more than launching new products – and at that time the last new product launched by Kraft was 6 years old!  Internally, the decision-support system was so geared toward defending the existing business that it made all marginal investments supporting existing brands look highly profitable – while killing the rate of return on new products by discounting potential sales and inflating costs! 

This D&E behavior isn't good for any business.  Consumer goods or otherwise.  And it's interesting to read that now retailers are starting to push back.  They are cutting the number of product variations to cut the inventory carrying costs.  As I mentioned, if you now have 6 different stock keeping units (SKUs) for Miracle Whip in various sizes, flavors and shapes but no additional sales you more than likely have doubled, tripled or even more the inventory – and simultaneously reduced "turns" – thus making the margin per foot of shelf space, and the inventory ROI, poorer.  Even with those "shelf fee" bribes the consumer goods manufacturer paid.

For consumers this is a great thing!  Because it frees up shelf space for new products.  It frees up buyers to look harder at truly new products, and new suppliers.  The retailer has the chance of revitalizing his stores by putting more excitement on the shelves, and giving the consumer something new.  This action is a Disruption for the individual retailer – pushing them to compete on products and services, not just having the same old products (in too many varieties) exactly the same as competitors.

This action, happening at WalMart, Walgreens, RiteAid, Kroger and Target according to the article, is an industry Disruption.  It impacts the manufacturers like Kraft and P&G by forcing them to bring more truly new products to the market if they want to maintain shelf facings and revenues.  It alters the selling proposition for all suppliers, making the "distribution fees" less of an issue and turning those retail buyers back into true merchandisers – rather than just people who review manufacturer supplied planograms before feeding numbers into the automated ordering system.  And it changes what the manufacturer's salespeople have to do.

The companies that will do well are those that now implement White Space to take advantage of this Disruption.  As you can imagine, it's a huge boon for the smaller, more entrepreneurial companies that may well have long been blocked from the big retailer's stores.  It allows them to get creative about pitching their products in an effort to help the retailer compete on product – not just price.  And for any existing supplier, they will have to use White Space to get more new products out faster.  And get their salesforce to change behavior toward selling new products rather than just defending the old products and facings.

Markets work in amazing ways.  Almost never do things happen as one would predict.  It's these unintended consequences of markets that makes them so powerful.  Not that they are "efficient" so much as they allow for Disruptions and big behavior changes.  And that gives the entrepreneurial folks, and the innovators, their opportunities to succeed.  For those in consumer goods, right now is a great time to talk to Target, Kohl's, Safeway, et.al. about how they can really change the competition by refocusing on your innovative new products again!