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Opinion: Super Bowl ads say I do
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Article RatingEach year there is a marked trend in Super Bowl advertising.
Seven years ago, when a new web venture seemed to launch every 30 seconds and the start-ups had venture capital money to burn, it was the dot-coms. Web sites were the No. 1 ad category that year, accounting for nearly $45 million in ad sales. Companies like Netpliance.com and Lifeminders, ones you'd never heard of before that night and never did hear from again, were among the record 17 dot-coms buying ad time.
Four years ago, movie studios bought up more than $20 million of time to hype blockbusters like “The Hulk,” “The Matrix Reloaded” and “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.” That was a record for film spending.
Three years ago, the trend seemed to be dirty commercials, which only seemed appropriate since it was the year Janet Jackson flashed everyone. Jackson's obscene moment as well as ads featuring flatulent horses and erectile dysfunction drugs created a huge viewer backlash, a furor that later prompted Congress to hike indecency fines.
So what will this year's trend be? It looks as if it's following the internet, though not in the same way as 2000. This year, the big trend in Super Bowl advertising is user-generated commercials, or ads that were conceived by National Football League fans themselves.
“I will be watching those spots with a great deal of interest to see if this is the beginning of a trend,” says Walter Guarino, an ad agency veteran and professor of advertising at Seton Hall University. “They all have be winners for that to happen. Two-out-of-three is not enough to say this is a new trend. Right now, it's a gimmick, but I think it's a darn good one at that.”
Frito-Lay, Chevrolet and the NFL all sponsored contests inviting Average Joes and Janes to submit ideas for a Super Bowl ad.
The NFL took pitches from fans before football games at stadiums across the country last fall. The league then invited fans to vote online for their favorite, though it ultimately selected the ad concept that came in second.
That idea was turned over to a professional team, including Joe Pytka, the director who worked on the “Bo Knows” commercials more than a decade ago. That team produced a slicker ad than the original submission. Meanwhile, Chevy followed a similar plan.
But Frito-Lay's Doritos contest was a bit different. Dorito eaters sent in video submissions, and the entry selected by the company will be seen in its original grainy-filmed entirety during the Super Bowl.
There's also rumored to be a fourth user-generated commercial in contention, one in which a California man asks his girlfriend to marry him. The man, whose identity has been concealed by the media for obvious reasons, lest they ruin the surprise, reportedly offered to pay CBS the full $2.6 million asking price for a 30-second ad.
The man failed in his initial attempt to find enough sponsors to make the asking price, but in recent days internet buzz has the commercial back on. If it airs, it could be one of the bigger developments in recent advertising history, as a national television ad buy has never been used as a personal memo pad before.
“The real people contest, the guy getting sponsors for his proposal ... they go a long way in getting pregame buzz,” says Keith Quesenberry, associate creative director at Harrisburg's Pavone ad agency, which tracks Super Bowl ad trends. “People are talking about them before they air.”
The entire user-generated trend can be, as mentioned before, traced to the web. The concept of user-generated material blossomed online and is flowering into other areas of media as well.
Digg.com was one of the first sites to invite readers to offer opinions and insight into daily news stories. Those articles are compiled at its web site, where any logged-in user can vote on the most popular articles.
Then there's Wikipedia, the user-written, user-edited web encyclopedia that is updated hourly by thousands of users across the world.
And of course YouTube, where amateur videographers post everything from last night's “Daily Show with Jon Stewart” highlights to their baby's first step to their community theater singing debut.
Over the past year, several particularly gifted amateurs have even parlayed their YouTube fame into lucrative professional deals with Carson Daly and, last week, Fox's “MADtv.”
The trend moved offline more recently with newspapers that now employ so-called citizen journalists, volunteers with little to no journalistic training who file reports on everything from school board meetings to car accidents. Meanwhile, amateur eyewitness video has been a staple of newscasts since the Rodney King videotape broke in the early 1990s.
The point is that there is a reason why user-generated content is taking off. People like to see things they themselves have created, or think they can create. They like to play a part in the creation. It makes the ads seem relatable.
Gino Bona, a Maine resident and oft-heartbroken Buffalo Bills fan who won the NFL contest, certainly understands that idea, and tried to make a commercial that achieved an emotional connection.
“I was thinking, is there a common denominator through my Super Bowl experiences, and I always recall once the game's over there's no more for six months, and that kind of bums me out,” he says. “I thought it was an emotional connection, a fun, self-deprecating angle on that.
“I really tried to make it not about one specific team or player, but rather have the stars be the fans themselves.”
But another reason for the rise of user-generated content is quite simple. It's cheap. Whereas ad agencies may deliberate for up to a year over the creative direction of a Super Bowl ad, contests shrink that time down to a few months and a couple mouse clicks.
“(Anheuser-Busch) usually has 10 spots in the game every year,” Quesenberry says. “They actually create 15 to 20 spots, test them (with an audience), and the most popular are the 10 they actually air.”
The average fan is excited to see these new ads. According to a study released Friday by comScore Networks, the digital measurement firm, 27 percent said they think consumer-generated commercials will be entertaining, compared with just 13 percent who said they think professionally produced commercials will be entertaining.
Women are most anticipating these ads, with 32 percent predicting the user-generated commercials will be entertaining.
Among the specific ads that respondents were most looking forward to seeing, Doritos ranked second behind Anheuser-Busch, the Super Bowl perennial whose Budweiser ads are generally considered the most popular year in and year out.
Are user-generated ads the wave of the future, or will they go the way of the dot-com advertisers? We'll know by Monday morning, when the polls on what advertising was most effective are released and the user-generated ads get a thumbs up or down from all the armchair quarterbacks.
Safe to say that if it's a thumbs up, we'll be seeing a lot more spots featuring some random man rather than one of the Manning brothers.
