Anheuser-Busch Reigns as Super Bowl Ad King
Forget the Giants. Anheuser-Busch was real winner last night. In an age when TV addicts record shows to fast-forward through the commercials, and others watch ad clips only when they are quirky or sensational enough to land on YouTube, the Super Bowl offers an increasingly rare opportunity for advertisers to vie for the affections of a live, attentive audience. That state of affairs, combined with a writer's strike that left networks struggling to maintain their ratings, has placed pressure on companies to make the most of every high-priced second.
No company, experts say, does this better than Anheuser-Busch, which devoted six of its seven spots last night to Bud Light.
In one commercial, a man on a romantic date is able to breathe fire after drinking Bud Light, and so he suavely kindles two candles before scorching the entire room. In another, a man rejoices at his newfound ability to fly until a plane sucks him in. In both cases, an announcer explains that breathing fire and flying are characteristics "no longer available in Bud Light. The endless refreshment remains."
"They use focus groups across the country," the television editor for the trade publication Advertising Age, Brian Steinberg, said. "They have a formula and a joke and then a message, and over the years they've really gotten it down to a science."
This year, experts say, as Super Bowl advertising hit a new peak, with Fox pricing some 30-second spots at as much as $3 million, advertisers have shied away from edgy, camcorder-shot spots created by consumers in favor of professionally masterminded campaigns and gentler images.
"Everyone who advertises on the Super Bowl combines it with a big p.r. campaign and a big Internet presence and maybe a big contest. In this day and age you need to do that," the clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Timothy Calkins, said. "The Super Bowl goes from being a one-time event to being a long campaign."
For example, Doritos, a subsidiary of Frito-Lay and PepsiCo, ran not only a regular Super Bowl commercial — featuring a giant rodent attacking a butler who munched on chips instead of putting them on a mousetrap — but also one that featured the winner of a contest in which an up-and-coming songwriter was chosen to have a professional music video produced.
Perhaps more important than producing a commercial that is part of a broader publicity blitz is the ability of an advertiser to create a visually-interesting commercial, according to the chairman of Michigan State University's Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing, Richard Cole.
"It's not real clear how much attention is being paid to the ads when people are at these Super Bowl parties," Mr. Cole said. "A highly visual impact ad, rather than one that relies on dialogue, would be more effective, considering people at parties are drinking and watching the big screen." One example from last night was when a troupe of lizards, featuring Naomi Campbell, re-enacted Michael Jackson's "Thriller" dance to promote PepsiCo's Life Water, the Neely Chair of American Enterprise at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, Gerard Tellis, said.
"Over the years, the emotional ads have been better than the informational ads. There's so much excitement. To rise above it, you have to be very funny," Mr. Tellis, who is also a professor of advertising, said.
The Best And the Worst
The Top Advertisements Shown During the Super Bowl according to a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Timothy Calkins.
Tide instant stain remover
E*trade
Coke
Fed-Ex
Budweiser
The Worst Advertisements
Salesgenie.com
GM Yukon
Careerbuilder.com
