(Caption: showing my Coca-Cola pride during the Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime Show)
With the Super Bowl last weekend and an entire week of foundations training for my job, I’ve been thinking a lot about marketing, advertising, and this concept of brand love. For example, I failed a blind taste test between Coca-Cola and Pepsi last year, but I still love Coke so much more. It’s my brand. I grew up with it. I would pay a premium to have a Coke instead of a Pepsi. That’s brand love.
Part One
The Super Bowl has become one of the only times of the year when it’s acceptable/encouraged to talk about advertising. In a way, it’s the advertising world’s Oscar… except you don’t need talent, and you buy your way in. Nevertheless, people actively watch the commercials and looked forward to the coolest new things. That’s not true in everyday life. DVRs were invented because people didn’t want to watch commercials. So how do we extend the attention span of viewers via TV (via cable or internet)? With ads leading up to the Super Bowl ad. Yes. With ads after the Super Bowl, so viewers can rewatch the ad or follow along in the storyline. Yes. But what about improving ads in general?
Part Two
“The Internet and social media have changed the way we behave” sounds cliché, but it’s true. People don’t mind interacting with their favorite brands and commenting or liking brand posts/tweets. Now, brands deliver us products and help us curate online content. Search allows us to find information about products, brands, do comparisons, and make the purchase. Guess what? We are doing that. So how do you extend that to offline, where consumers are still watching ads, but aren’t talking to each other about it as they do during the Super Bowl?
Part Three
Last night, The Looney Tunes Show (new one) came on my DVR. I was about to fast forward through the commercials when I started watching the cartoons aimed at children. I was so much more interested in children’s commercials than any of the adult commercials I see in normal programming. Why? Because the commercials were informative. They introduced me to a cool new game or a cool new game feature. The messaging was all around the product and why it’s cool instead of why using this particular brand of toilet paper will make me more sociable.
I watched every single commercial – and added Nerf products on my WANT! list.
Musing
Make commercials that are informative. Funny. Passionate. Use TV advertising as another way to curate your content and your brand messaging. If it needs to be about product attributes, told me about product attributes. Don’t weave jingles and a storyline and psychology into a TV ad. Just tell me the facts. Or tell me something interesting but with a theme (Redbull has been so good at consistently owning extreme sports that I can guess it’s Redbull even if they don’t brand the extreme sports content – which they do). And maybe we will start talking about cool things we saw via the “Coca-Cola” show (30 secs of cool content between the program in watching) instead of another ad.
Because my time is precious. And I’m willing to pay more, way more, for a brand – see iPhone, Kate Spade shoes, moleskin notebooks, and Song flat screen.
So give me good content or good product information instead of just an ad. Give me back my 9 minutes every 30 minutes I watch TV (give or take). And I’ll love you back. I’ll buy your brand. And hey, if you just tell me why the shoe is better instead of using D list celebs, Sketchers, I may actually buy your crappy shoes. Ok, that conclusion was a lie, but you get the point.
), and I’m already nostalgic looking back on some of my best first experiences. So without further interruption, here’s my list of firsts with my McCombs MBA.
