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Super Bowl Ads: One More Fumble
Branding is a process, not an event. Not even at an event like the
Super Bowl!
Every year in the run-up to Super Bowl, there is more hype about
the ads than there is about the game: cost per 30 seconds (this
year topping $3 million), who’s in, who’s out and stories
about great ads of the past (like the Apple vs. IBM classic). And
of course, pity the poor Canadians, fighting to find a Super Bowl
Party with access to American programming and commercials so as
not to miss this marvelous mini-film festival. (Then there’s
anticipation of wardrobe malfunctions…congrats, Prince, for
keeping your pants on).
While Super Bowl ads are wonderfully entertaining half-minute movies,
they are, for the most part, not Brand builders – because
all the excitement puts the participating marketers under pressure
to go off-Brand. The exorbitant, all-or-nothing cost has
them questioning their own sanity (should we be spending this
much to send out the same old message?) and their strategy (surely
this one-shot cost, in this high-creative environment, deserves
something new and special!). And their creative partners, the
guys who actually create these Super-commercials, are desperate
to use this once-in-a-career opportunity to try something "revolutionary"
and build their own reputations.
And so, in a world where strong Brands are built with consistency
of message and consistency over time, Super Bowl brings out the
worst in Brand discipline, with negative results to match. A few
years back, Budweiser ran their attention-getting "wassup?"
campaign only to see sales drop – with people saying
"funny yah, but what’s the premium-positioned King
of Beers now doing with the street level wassup?"
What would the Brand Coach coach?
 While
very, very few marketers will ever come even close to using the
Super Bowl, they will all have moments of temptation. Temptation
to do something out of their Brand’s character for a special
occasion. Temptation to say something different because their competitors
are. And temptation to change what they stand for just because they
are bored and assume everyone else is.
Don’t you do it!
Customers of all kinds love "their" Brands – because
in a world of hyper-choice and hyper-messaging, their Brands are
the only constant. Brands today are tools of self-defense –
they allow trusting customers to ignore the advertising of competitive
products and save brainspace for other, more important things. But
when marketers change the message, they risk losing the trust of
customers – and the customers themselves.
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