The other day, I was listening to a popular marketing podcast.  This was a post super bowl episode, and the topic was the commercials. Guests on the show included various brand managers and agency folk. They were talking about a common theme of their work which they all agreed was the big driver of their success.  

They waxed on in glorious terms about their achievements in large part due to this major insight. It was if they were the first to discover electricity or the Beatles or something…. I turned up the volume. 

The driver of their work, the holy grail, the golden nugget, the secret sauce…”it’s all about the customer.” 

That’s it. The customer. They managed to fill over 40 minutes of airtime talking about why it is essential to keep the customer first in all they do and how it affects the strategy and the work and the success of their work. 

Maybe these folks were raised by robots. The notion that the audience is central to their success seemed a revelation. Hello? These were all articulate people but to me they missed an opportunity to have a more nuanced and valuable discussion about their audience insight and not limit themselves to the cleverness of the work. 

Audience, Brand, Creative – the ABC’s of advertising. 

As one of the last truly large-scale communal cultural events, super bowls ads are no longer simply about advertising, they are part of the show, the cultural moment, let’s go all-in and call it a high point. But the real game is away from the ball. The real game of advertising is being won and lost in the trenches, day-in and day-out. It’s the integrated campaigns that have the legs to live in the media, where the customer lives every day that will be the real winners. The Super bowl happens once a year, the super segmented social super bowl (say that 10 times fast) happens 24/7, 365. There is no getting around it. Targeted media to your Audience, the Brand relevance, and the Creativity to make it stick. 

After reading the rankings from Forbes, NY Times, Boston Globe, iSpot TV, USA Today’s Ad Meter and others, it’s clear that if you are in need of support to justify your personal top 5- 10 spots you are bound to find it. Only a couple of the rankings mentioned consideration of the game away from the ball; the knock-on effect of the social impact of a strategically integrated idea, an idea with its hooks in culture. The more thoughtfully integrated ideas have potential for real shelf life, the rest are at risk of just being part of game day entertainment.

Perhaps being entertaining is enough, but to quote a famous film about football, Show me the money.