In the ultimate commercial competition, the best Super Bowl commercial is….
Actually, it isn’t a commercial – it’s an NBC line-up promo.
LMAO – showed men and women literally laughing their asses off and was the only belly laugh of the entire show. (Other than Bruce Springsteen overshooting his knee slide and taking out the cameraman)
Seriously the NBC promos were the highlight. This year’s line-up of commercials was, well, I think it can be summed up in one word – Pepsuber. (Warning – no brain cells were injured in the making of this commercial because no brain cells were involved.)
And if you look at the commercial line-up from a marketing to women perspective – the only comparison would be to this year’s 0-16 Detroit Lions’ season.
If you believe Super Bowl commercials, women don’t: buy cars, buy tires, watch movies, register website domain names, hunt for jobs online, buy flowers, shop online, plan family trips, drink soda, drink beer, or eat snacks (except to throw them at other women to induce a pigeon mauling).
Now, Careerbuilder.com did include a woman screaming in her car and riding a dolphin (there’s a situation we can all relate to) but when they added “urge to punch small animals” the women were gone.
I will give a shout out to Citibank for actually focusing their mobile banking commercial on an African American mom and her two daughters (hmmm, who does that remind you of?) but they lose points for setting it in a shopping mall.
And the stuffed gorilla kind of creeped me out, but AXA Equitable’s annuity commercial gave a nod to women business travelers and women investors.
Why did some advertisers who trotted out older spots choose the spots most suited for a male audience? Think Sprint/Nextel – I love their “roadies” campaign. But why did they choose the airplane commercial? The roadies take over the school campaign would have been very female friendly, and frankly, is one of my favorite commercials on the air. (Note, they did air it, but after the game was over).
So how could they have done better?
Almost everyone did a great job of including their website addresses on the commercials. But one suggestion – keep it on the screen for more than 2 seconds – in many cases I did not have a chance to write down the address.
Be careful that when you appeal to men, you don’t piss off your female customers.
Take the Telaflora.com commercial – “What do boxed flowers say? – go home to your fat smelly cat, no one wants to see you naked.” Yikes – as a woman watching that commercial – I had a negative response to the boxed flowers AND to Telaflora.com. While a few of the guys thought it was funny, not one of the women did.
My sister suggested a rewrite that the girls thought was great - “What do boxed flowers say? You are an afterthought. His secretary sent it. Only his wife gets the good stuff. He only did it to get double mileage points.”
Ah well. Ladies – this wasn’t our year. The good news is, while advertisers don’t seem to care too much about us, NBC wants us to watch their shows. Can’t wait for the next Chuck, Heroes, Medium line-up.
Thanks to everyone who watched the game with me and to my new favorite bartender - Kim deSousa at The Palm.
UPDATE - This essay is also part of a longer piece on advertising and the Superbowl at M2W E-ssentials. Check out what other marketing-to-women leaders have to say about the ads -
http://www.m2w.biz/essentials/index.php
Posted by: Holly Buchanan | February 03, 2009 at 12:34 PM
Interesting perspective that I, with my typical male brain, completely missed. Looking back on the commercials, though, yeah, they did have absolutely nothing in them to connect with women at all.
And in an interesting side note, a mentioned to a bunch of guys the next day that I thought the NBC promo for Heroes was the most clever commercial in the game. I got a collective yawn.
So I guess the commercials that appealed to women (and some men) didn't do as well at connecting with men.
Posted by: Jeff Baas | February 04, 2009 at 02:09 PM