Some advertisers, such as Pedigree, have embraced the multi-channel experience of today’s consumers coordinating campaigns across traditional and digital domains. But even for those that haven’t explicitly gone digital yet, many consumers are taking them there anyway. Thousands of viewers were already blogging and tweeting about the new flock of commercials before the Steelers finished their Dom Perignon. At Crimson Hexagon, we wanted to know who successfully made the leap from mainstream to digital buzz. A look at both beverages and foods shows that results were mixed.
Running with the Clydesdales
Online Buzz for Beverage Brands
Anheuser-Busch once again led the pack in buying eight spots (four for Bud and four for BudLight). Given its long history of Super Bowl advertising, it’s no wonder that the buzz for Bud actually started ahead of the game, and has risen to nearly eight times the pre-game level.
In the standing battle between Coke and Pepsi (each invested in three spots), Pepsi appears to have made the bigger splash. Pepsi more than doubled online buzz, bringing it even (and heading higher) than Coke, which has seen minimal lift over its already strong buzz presence.
But the real winner within the drinks category so far has been Sobe Life Water. In the first two days, Sobe’s one commercial (featuring cameos by NFL players dancing with lizards in a 3D variant on Swan Lake) netted them buzz roughly five times their pre-game level. As if NFL players in tutus weren’t enough, Sobe’s choice to make this ad 3D generated extra anticipatory buzz the entire week leading into the Super Bowl.
Running for the Border
Online Buzz for Food & Snack Brands
Now perhaps it was because Taco Bell ignored the rule about including animals, but I find it pretty surprising that their Speed Date commercial hasn’t noticeably moved the needle. Maybe the offline buzz simply moved too fast to be caught online… Or maybe Draft FCB will be rethinking its approach to digital this week.
In other junk food news… chips appear to be highly bloggable. Cheetos has seen five times more buzz than before the Super Bowl. But Doritos’ two commercials led the pack with a 10 times jump in online chatter. How’d they do it? Well, they tapped into both the traditional Power of Creative Crunch and the wisdom of their chip-eating crowd. Who could have predicted such success would come from actively engaging your customers?
Booth Review
All this leads to some tough questions for agencies and brand managers who participated in this year’s Super Ad Bowl. Brows are furrowed as they digest the results of their commercials and turn their eyes towards managing the ongoing campaigns.
For the majority of brands that saw a big boost in buzz, kudos are warranted. But now that consumers are talking, the questions become:
What are they talking about? (Was it “funny”, “same as last year”, or “better than Apple’s 1984 commercial”?)
Are the topics discussed consistent with our goals for the brand? (Are our brand attributes performing as expected? How’s our positive share of voice vs. our competitors?)
Who was talking and in which channels? (Was it bloggers, or were tweets flying around like paper airplanes in front of a substitute teacher?)
For those left in the dust, the question is “Where’s the buzz”? Perhaps their target audience somehow hasn’t heard about this whole social media thing yet (I give Frosted Flakes a little more leeway on this than Taco Bell). Or perhaps there’s only so much buzz a brand can take – had Coke already reached an optimal amount of ongoing buzz?
For the few standing on the sidelines, the question is whether it was worth saving the $3M per spot. Did you miss a chance to Steel the show?
Agencies and a few brave clients converged on OMMA Social in San Francisco earlier this week. The most debated panel was about “Personal CPM” (a term championed by Charlene Li back in 2007).
In short, personal CPM reflects each person’s value as a publisher of content with influence. Everyone will develop their own number which defines their worth to an advertiser or a marketer. Accordingly, companies will market through high-CPM individuals rather than market to the unwashed masses directly.
Maybe—to me the real issue is that things we do offline constantly seem creepier when they’re brought online. Marketers sell through the credibility of other people in other media all the time: from celebrity endorsements (Boomers can buy Vuitton if Keith Richards does) to product placements (Ford’s a lot cooler when Will Smith is driving). One of the panelists mentioned that he was happy to hand over his grocery store card and embedded personal info to save a buck—and, presumably, does not worry about the invisible transactions that may or may not occur later that day (like their correlating his love for cinnamon with a cinnamon cereal promo, or, more nefariously, selling his love for Ho-Hos and cigarettes to a health insurer.)
Online, these brand piggybacks on people’s credibility are more visible in a new medium where authenticity is still valued. Everyone’s creep factor will be different on this one, and the murky definition of creepy leaves us with Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said of obscenity: I know it when I see it.
Less than 6 weeks ago, Pepsi was grabbing attention in the blogosphere with leaks of their new branding. The company followed up by sending the new cans to 25 of the blogging elite and soliciting feedback on Friendfeed. Reaction to both the logo and the campaign was somewhatmixed, but Pepsi deserves credit for adopting a direct and fresh style to generate buzz beyond the tired milieu of the insider blog or vanilla social network presence.
The company’s in the spotlight once again after publishing ads for Pepsi Max in a German magazine featuring a black-humor take on the suicide of a personified calorie. The (suspiciously crisp) images of the ads have been inciting a fiery backlash centered around the fact that most people don’t find suicide all that funny (surprise!). Recall GM’s 2007 Superbowl spot, which showed an assembly robot throwing itself off a bridge, was withdrawn amid public criticism. Pepsi’s already pulled the ad but the question remains: what the devil are they up to?
Pepsi is a Fortune 100 company with a colossal marketing engine. Having bought twospots in last year’s Superbowl, they surely were aware of GM’s snafu. For me to believe that their publishing a highly controversial advertisement in a single magazine in Düsseldorf is some kind of fluke requires excessive suspension of disbelief. Yet, by publishing on such a small scale and then quickly retracting, Pepsi has achieved the corporate equivalent of plausible deniability.
Normally this type of ‘gaffe’ is a challenge to a brand’s reputation. I think there are still a few dents in the Kevlar over at Motrin marketing, and they were making light of baby slings, not suicide. But what’s left to criticize Pepsi® for? The ads have been withdrawn, there’s no real physical evidence to speak of, and the ads’ short reach diminishes perceived accountability. I’ve noticed that while many commenters lambaste the subject matter, there is surprisingly little bile toward Pepsi for choosing to employ it.
So Pepsi has managed once again to initiate massive word of mouth interest in their brand at nearly zero cost. They’re clearly gained a tolerance for risk and I can’t wait to see what’s next in Pepsi’s special ops marketing campaign. I just wonder in their quest to stir up buzz they’ll end up poking the beehive just a little too hard.
Marta Strickland of Organic has a terrific article in AdAge on the looming intersection of semantic web and marketing. The article’s title What Can Semantic Web—or Web 3.0—Can Do for Marketers? was bound to raise some hackles: our Utopian semantically-rich online future meets marketers flogging their wares online. Strickland introduces the concept of 3.0 and uncovering meaning behind the data, and contemplates what semantic capability could mean for making ads relevant and metrics meaningful.
The value of understanding meaning as well as words is becoming ever clearer. Marketers looking to understand how far buzz is resonating as well as where to place campaigns are all too familiar with the limitations of simple keyword matching. And any web user who has searched for Pink the singer versus Victoria’s Secret Pink lingerie versus breast cancer Pink can relate to their keyword pain.
How might Web 3.0 change this? Google AdWords currently places ads primarily based on a keyword approach. How long will it be before AdWords or other prominent ad networks develop or partner for semantic capability, ensuring marketers know which “Pink” they’re getting?
Today there’s still some confusion about which online marketing tactics are resonating, and how best to measure their ROI. Marketers are still learning where they can and can’t play successfully online. Strickland poses the right question at the end: anyone promising to bring semantic benefit to your business should be able to readily explain how their technology will make your ads more relevant and your metrics more meaningful. Bridging the disconnect with ad-weary consumers and helping marketers measure their results will help marketers better target their onlne efforts—always important, but vital in a downturn.
BusinessWeek Online reports on a move by Google to make social network advertising more relevant by developing an InfluenceRank. This technology would help assess an individual socnet member’s level of influence over a group of peers — sort of a FICO score of your personal profile’s influence.
Joe Marchese at MediaPost’s Online Spin offers an interesting perspective: it’s clear you can’t directly correlate activity with influence, without risking overvaluing the influence of a follow-happy Florida car dealer who’s finagled more reciprocal Twitter relationships than Peter Kim. More importantly, what will marketers do with influence levels; will paying a higher CPM on a higher InfluenceRank personal profile actually achieve influence? This capability might end up a red herring; offering a quick-fix to marketers reluctant to dive deep into developing the social media capabilities that might drive longer term community value.
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