Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Which Super Bowl ads made the best impression? Which ads fared the worst? These are key business questions as the nation recovers from the televisual orgy known as Super Bowl XLII.

To the Super Bowl ads you missed, or to see them again, check out the video player on our dedicated page, Big Game Central. That page also collects analysis from our industry experts on various business angles of the Super Bowl.

Having read a lot of this morning’s news coverage on Super Bowl commercials, I like these takes best:

• Wall Street Journal: Coke, Clydesdales Score With Super Bowl Viewers
• Reuters: Supermodels, celebrities dominate Super Bowl ads
• AP: Ahead of the Bell: Superbowl Advertisers

At the party I attended, favorite ads inluded Will Ferrell’s goofy Bud Light spot, Audi’s Godfather-themed ad (everyone agreed the Audi R8 advertised is smokin’), and Bridgestone’s spot featuring a petrified squirrel who fears he’s about to be run over. My wife liked the Victoria’s Secret ad featuring Adriana Lima in sexy-but-tasteful black lingerie (thank you, Victoria’s Secret!), and I especially liked two very different football-themed spots: the NFL’s witty spot about oboe-playing lineman Chester Pitts, and Under Armour’s minute-long, semi-apocalyptic, 300-style ad for its shoes — which, by implication, pits Under Armour against the dominance of Nike in that market.

My friends were perplexed by Frito-Lay’s Doritos ad featuring unknown singer Kina Grannis. Nothing wrong with Grannis’s voice or the execution of the ad — we just didn’t grasp what Doritos had to do with promoting unknown musical acts. Many other ads registered no more than an “Ehh” with my crowd.

As for what I disliked, I agree wholeheartedly with Suzanne Vranica’s take from the Wall Street Journal story linked above:

The biggest fumble of the night with viewers was by Salesgenie.com, a company that provides databases to marketers. More than half-a-dozen ad executives found the company’s animation spots offensive. In one ad, a married panda-bear couple speaking with Asian accents worries that they may go out of business but are saved by a panda psychic who recommends Salesgenie; the other ad shows a white boss berating an Indian salesman, Ramesh, who has eight children.

“Its hard to imagine that a company would be that insensitive,” says Rita Rodriguez, chief executive of the Brand Union US, a branding firm owned by WPP Group PLC.

Later on I’ll have more to say about the game on the field and the management lessons we might extract from it.

The Super Bowl is as much a championship for advertising as it is for football. Big companies like Pepsi and FedEx spend millions to reinforce established brands, while upstarts like Salesgenie.com or GoDaddy try to gain brand recognition with controversial or aggressive Super Bowl ads. Whether large or small, companies hope that the high cost of entry — $2.7 million for a 30-second commercial — will make their Super Bowl advertising investment worthwhile.

Sometimes it works. Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad for the Macintosh brought huge recognition to Apple at a time when IBM PCs ruled the computing world. Today that spot is seen as one of the most famous Super Bowl ads ever — and indeed as one of the greatest television ads of all time.

Last year, GoDaddy’s steamy Super Bowl ad turned off plenty of watchers, but it also created a spike of awareness — and new business — for the domain-name registration company. Meanwhile, Salesgenie’s 2007 Super Bowl ad, which implied that using the company’s sales prospecting lists would put you in a hot car with a hot blonde on your arm, was voted one of the worst Super Bowl ads ever . . . yet that didn’t deter Salesgenie.com from ponying up for commercial spots again this year.

Why such devotion by advertisers to Super Bowl advertisements? It’s not only that the Super Bowl delivers hundreds of millions of viewers, but that these viewers are actually watching the ads as part of the show. This is especially true since the Super Bowl audience includes many millions of viewers who don’t normally watch football, and who may or may not care much about the Patriots and the Giants. But even these casual sports fans pay special attention when the commercials come on.

For football fans, the Super Bowl is about football. But for the culture at large, it’s about spectacle — and the commercials are a key part of the fun.

So, uh, any big games this weekend?

Probably there’s a recent transplant to the U.S. from Japan or Hungary for whom that’s a real question. For the rest of the country, sports fans or not, the answer is becoming increasingly obvious as Super Bowl hype builds to a fever pitch.

The Super Bowl commands so much attention for many reasons, and several of the most imporant ones have little to do with football per se. This is so because the culmination of the NFL championship hunt has become a cultural event and a business event as much as it is a sporting event.

As a cultural event, Super Bowl Sunday has become an informal national holiday, on par with Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. It’s a holiday when people get their friends together, fire up the grill, and drink too much beer as they celebrate . . . well, what exactly? I think most of us are celebrating friendship and a sort of imprecise Americanness — but one that’s open to anyone, male or female, American or otherwise, who’s willing to put up with a four-and-a-half-hour football game.

Meanwhile, canny marketers have turned the event into a major selling opportunity. Old-school advertising has had more and more trouble in recent years cutting through the clutter of marketing messages that bombards consumers daily; the Super Bowl provides one of the very few opportunities to reach hundreds of millions of consumers across all demographics. And since Super Bowl commercials have become a competitive genre in their own right, many of those consumers will purposefully pay special attention to the advertisements — something that they never do otherwise.

The Super Bowl’s success as a marketing venue is the apotheosis of the NFL’s triumphant quest to become the dominant league in an American sports landscape populated by giants. Baseball is still called the “national pastime,” but the gridiron long ago displaced the diamond in the hierarchy of American sport. And while the NBA has risen (in the 1980s and 1990s) and declined (in this decade), the NFL has sailed serenely on, gaining popularity by the year. So it’s no wonder that the grand finale of the pro football season attracts so much attention.

It helps when there’s a good game scheduled on the field, too — and Super Bowl XLII could be a doozy. League officials must have been salivating for many weeks now, since playoff matchups made it likely that either an undefeated New England Patriots team or their archnemesis, the defending-champion Indianapolis Colts, would face either the Dallas Cowboys or the Green Bay Packers — two of the most popular and storied franchises in American sports.

Given the likelihood of these matchups, the New York Giants could be viewed as an upstart team, except that they represent the largest city in the country and have their own long and proud history of championship football. They got to the Super Bowl by beating the Cowboys in Dallas, and then topping the Packers in a bitterly cold game in Lambeau Stadium. The Giants have also peaked at the right time: since the beginning of December, they’ve won six out of eight games.

One of those two losses came in the last week of the regular season, when the Giants lost at home to the Patriots in a 38-35 nail-biter. In facing the Giants again, the Patriots will be attempting to do the unthinkable by putting up a combined 19-0 record, a mark that no team has ever accomplished. Besides establishing a record that might stand for decades — as the 1972 Miami Dolphins’ perfect 17-0 season has until now — a Patriots win on Sunday would crown a great football dynasty, since New England also won championships in 2002, 2004, and 2005. (In their “off” years, the Pats went 9-7, 11-6, and 14-4.) It would also, after the champagne stopped flowing, raise the question of what the most successful NFL team of this decade could do to top itself.

The same spoiled-for-choice question already faces the NFL: how do you improve on the most successful annual sporting event in the world?

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Stay tuned to this blog and to Bizmology this week and next as we bring you more coverage of the Super Bowl and its business ramifications.

Ben McConnell of the Church of the Customer Blog has made a habit of collecting his junk mail and weighing it at the end of each year. This year’s tally: a record 21.5 pounds! You can read his comments about it here:

Weighty marketing ‘07

. . . Until the industry seriously considers enforcing a permission-driven system, rather than its favored opt-out model, the tide against snail-mail spam will probably only get stronger.

Agree/disagree?

I agree. Consumer/citizens will tolerate all sorts of nonsense up to a point, and then if they can’t get relief from companies, they will turn to regulators or the courts. (It’s the same thing that’s going on with the airline industry’s refusal to establish a maximum time that airliners can wait on the tarmac before offering passengers some relief.)

For myself, I certainly understand it when I get offers to re-up for things I’ve done before (charitable contributions, magazine subscriptions, etc.). I don’t mind straightforward advertisements by mail when they put their value proposition plainly. (GEICO, I’ve found, is pretty good for this: I don’t use them, but I can respect straightforward messages like “You could save up to 20% on car insurance. See inside for more information.”) But I also get a lot of nonsense. Me personally, I just open it all while standing over the recycling bin, and while I regret the waste of paper, I don’t let it get under my skin.

But there are surely others who take it much more seriously, as McConnell’s reference to pending legal fights against direct-marketers makes clear.

What about you? Does junk mail direct marketing mail anger you? Disgust you? Amuse you? Delight you?

I acknowledge it’s possible that my answer to this question is such a strong NO because I have a 9-year-old daughter of my own. But in general I’m appalled anytime I see the Britneyfication of the tween set, whether it comes from the execrable Bratz dolls (way to go, MGA Entertainment!) or Nair’s new Nair Pretty, “a line aimed at 10- to 15-year-olds,” according to this New York Times story:

Depilatory Market Moves Far Beyond the Short-Shorts Wearers

[…] The product comes in kiwi and peach scents, in packages that show illustrations of doe-eyed teenage girls, and for the first time Nair is marketing directly to middle-schoolers. Ads for Nair Pretty, which are running in magazines like CosmoGirl and Seventeen, make no mention of boys or romance, but rather suggest that the depilatory is a stubble-free path to empowerment.

I almost don’t know where to begin with critiquing this product, but fortunately the wits at Gawker* got to the story ahead of me:

The company is facing the difficult challenge of selling a product to middle schoolers who might not purchase their own depilatory products (they’re aiming the ads at moms), but we salute and wish them well: If we can somehow convince young women to go hairless their entire lives, the mainstreaming of pornography will finally reach critical mass.

Well, precisely. I’m sure Church & Dwight — Nair’s parent company — is staffed by wholesome people, many of whom have kids of their own. And I’m sure that these folks have convinced themselves that (a) there’s a single market of 10- to 15-year-old girls, and (b) all parts of that market should be exposed to the appeal of Nair Pretty.

But neither of these things is true. Observe girls in this age range, and you’ll see the enormous differences — not just physical but social and emotional — between 10- and 13- and 15-year-olds. Not two in a hundred of the younger ones need depilatories, and Nair shouldn’t be marketing to them.

Can they? Of course. It’s a free country, and it’s not like they’re pushing hard drugs. But they should have the better sense not to. I don’t know how you’d split off the 10- to 12-year-olds from the 13- to 15-year-olds, but I’m sure the marketing pros at Church & Dwight can figure it out. And I hope they will.

The NYT article makes another good observation that’s worth addressing in the same vein:

Girls were, of course, agonizing about body hair before Nair got around to developing a product for them. Laser hair removal is the most popular cosmetic procedure for those 18 and under, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

Right, and if we’re talking about 17-year-old who wants to permanently remove the bridge of hair joining her eyebrows — or clean up her bikini line — then great. But there’s miles of open water, in the scheme of life, between a girl of age 10 and a woman of age 17. Marketers should leave well enough alone and let girls remain girls.

They’ll grow up soon enough to buy your products, anyway.

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* Thanks to David for pointing out the Gawker link.

As I write this, the lead runners are approaching the finish line of the death-defying 135-mile Kiehl’s Badwater Ultramarathon. Let’s break down the name:

• “Kiehl’s”: As you will have guessed, the main race sponsor is Kiehl’s Since 1851 LLC. (Why do I love it that they put “Since 1851″ in their name?) Now owned by L’Oréal, Kiehl’s has been a purveyor of high-end lotions, soaps, shampoos, and the like since . . . well, you know since when.
• “Badwater”: Read: “Death Valley” — because this race starts in the furnace-like depths of Death Valley before climbing up the slopes of Mt. Whitney. Just for fun, you understand, and to pursue that whole “What are the limits of human capability?” thing.
• “Ultramarathon”: Anything longer than the regulation 26.2-mile marathon distance. The most common lengths are 50 kilometers (about 31 miles), 50 miles, 100 kilometers, and . . . wait for it . . . 100 miles. But the folks who put Badwater together, they weren’t interested in a mere 100 miles, so they bumped it on up.

Anyway, after all that astounding heat — although it was a relatively cool 112 degrees Fahrenheit when the race started yesterday — not to mention fluid loss, blisters, and so on, I’m sure the participants will welcome having some of Kiehl’s finest emollients lavished upon their suffering bodies. In that sense, maybe this niche event is a good fit for a sponsorship from a niche brand like Kiehl’s. In a way, I admire the will and skill of these ultra-long-distance runners . . . and then in another way I think they’re just plain crazy.

But good luck to them! If you care to, you can track the racers’ progress here.

Bad earnings just about everywhere you look . . .

• Gannett — publisher of USA TODAY — reported numbers that look so-so until you take out the special gains the company recorded during the reporting period. Earnings on continuing operations: down.
• Media General — Earnings: down.
• McClatchy — Earnings: down.
• Dow Jones — Earnings: down.

This is from just a quick scan of the headlines. Have I missed anybody — any more newspaper companies whose earnings are hemorrhaging from declining ad sales?

Meanwhile, craigslist and Google: please stop trying so hard to stifle your grins, okay?