Super Bowl Ads: Creativity for its own sake

If you’re looking for another blog post of most- and least-favorite Super Bowl ads, you won’t find it here. Though I will say that anything with Betty White is a winner in my book.

Super Bowl ads have become a joke, and not in a good way. The stories are about the ads themselves, not the products they’re trying to sell, or the brands they’re representing. The big game is more of a showcase for ad agencies, a contest to see who can make the ad of the game. Creativity for creativity’s sake.

Good advertising should allow the brand message to resonate with the target audience. It should connect with the consumer and create some spark of awareness about the key benefit of the product for sale.

Instead, Super Bowl ads, for the most part, are just trying to out-do one another to get laughs, often at the expense of the brand. Although the Super Bowl still delivers a great value in terms of the audience size, I have to believe that the $3 million plus production costs of the ad could be much better spent.

The problem, of course, is advertising in general doesn’t work like it used to. People are skeptical, and don’t like having messages shoved in their faces when they’re trying to enjoy a game or a TV show. Today’s marketers have to be smarter than that.

There are ways to stand out in the Super Bowl ad race, and one of those ways is to have your ad rejected. GoDaddy.com became a master of this tactic. Make your ad too controversial so as to be rejected by the network. Then issue a news release about your ad being rejected. People will jump on YouTube immediately to see what all the fuss is about. This year, gay dating site ManCrunch.com used this tactic perfectly.

Recognizing that most people reading this blog are not in a position to buy ad space during the Super Bowl, what is the lesson here? It’s simply this: resist blowing big chunks of your market on making a big splash. You will be much better served engaging in far cheaper marketing tactics that engage your customers and build loyalty and community around your brand.