FOR RELEASE: Jan. 22, 2001
Contact: Franklin CrawfordOffice: 607-255-9737E-Mail: [email protected]
ITHACA, N.Y. -- It's becoming a tradition for Douglas Stayman: The Cornell University marketing expert and his students will play Monday morning quarterback, of the commercial sort, following Super Bowl XXXV. Forget who wins the game: Stayman and company will discuss which Super Bowl ads grabbed the ring and what companies got the hook in the high-stakes battle for the hottest commercial slots sold on television.
Stayman, an associate professor of marketing at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management, has led the Johnson School Marketing Club through this Super Bowl exercise for several years. Stayman himself fields calls at home after the Super Bowl, offering state-of-the-ad analysis to the media. With the price of ad time at $2.3 million per 30-second spot, flops are disastrous, as so many dot-coms learned last year (dot-coms dominated Super Bowl XXXIV advertising).
"A few dot-coms got what they wanted out of the Super Bowl ads, but a lot of them went for too much originality to break through the clutter and be unusual, and that was a big mistake," said Stayman. "Many of those commercial were all about being noticed -- that often means brand recognition gets lost and no one understands the product being offered."
This year few dot-coms are back, and Super Bowl commercials will be dominated by old guard advertisers like McDonald's, VISA, Budweiser, Pepsi and FedEx. Stayman gives his students several rules of thumb by which to judge the ads:
1) Do the ads grab and hold the viewer's attention? Easier said than done in the Super Bowl crush.
2) Do the ads pique consumer curiosity relevant to the brand and what does the viewer take away from the ad that's brand-specific? "The brand should be the hero of the ad, not the actors portraying the brand," Stayman said.
3) If they do get viewers curious, then is the ad right as a marketing investment for that brand at that point in time? If the ad is good and the product isn't, there's a problem. Stayman cites a Pepsi Clear commercial that got consumers curious. Obstacle: The soda wasn't as good as the ad.
4) Finally, is there some sort of special aspect in the ad that marketers can build on? Stayman mentions a popular McDonald's ad featuring basketball legends Larry Bird and Michael Jordan playing a game of H-O-R-S-E for a Big Mac. Even though many viewers mistook it for an ad about sneakers because Jordan was so identified with Nike at the time, McDonalds marketers fine-tuned the commercial and parlayed the popular ad into a successful campaign that ran long after the Super Bowl.
Even if marketers meet their goals, the Super Bowl is still a gamble. If it's a lopsided score, many viewers often tune out the game -- and the commercials -- especially since so many viewers are at large parties. But Super Bowl commercials have become almost as much an American spectator sport as the game itself, and the gridiron offers the promise of greener pastures to savvy marketers.
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