It’s 2011 and Super Bowl XLV has come and gone. Bread bowls of spinach dip were made & consumed and cheap beer was bought & drank during the course of two uniquely American competitions.
The first for the Lombardi Trophy and the title of the world’s greatest football team. And the second for the innumerable benefits that a business can reap (increased revenue, improved brand appeal, enhanced positioning, word-of-mouth chatter) from the creation of one great television spot.
At the culmination of the battle between the Green Bay Packers (the second oldest franchise in the NFL) and the Pittsburgh Steelers (the oldest franchise in the AFC) one team had won and the other had lost.
When the Super Bowl ads had all been shown and televisions across the U.S. had dissolved to black, we were all losers.
Not for any lack of effort. Advertising placement alone cost more than $200 million this year. And that doesn’t even account for the millions of dollars sunk into the creation of the ads by top agencies across the country.
Dogs acting like humans, babies acting like adults and celebrities acting poorly. Truly brilliant.
It was hard to pick out any ads whose performance matched the occasion. However, one campaign trend was quite clear - crowd sourced advertising is here to stay.
According to the USA Today Ad Meter, which measures the top rated commercials during the Super Bowl, crowd-sourced ads for Doritos and Pepsi Max captured three of the top five spots during the evening.
It’s hard to say for sure whether this holds positive or negative implications for advertising agencies. Perhaps it’s a little of both. What is clear though is that it seems to be a trend that resonates with consumers and is one that agencies must be prepared to facilitate if a client is inclined to move in that direction with their campaign.
"Maybe next year we can do something like Doritos", the client will say. And of course somebody has to facilitate the development of a campaign which solicits the ideas of the masses. But that might not be a position many traditional advertising agencies find too attractive.
Then again, if the quality of this year’s ads were any indication, their ideas weren’t that great either.
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