7 Marketing Lessons for Businesses from the Super Bowl

Running a small business is a lot of pressure. But, what if 110 million people were watching you everyday like at the Super Bowl? This is the type of stress that businesses face when they advertise by spending $3M for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial.
For some consumers, the commercials are a very popular part of the event. Super Bowl ads have produced many breakthrough moments in television and many more bombs. There are memorable commercials from the 2010 Super Bowl like Betty White for Snickers and the Old Spice Man, and 2011 Super Bowl's Doritos. But there have been many more horrible ads like Pets.com sock puppet.

So without spending millions of dollars, what can your business learn by watching Super Bowl commercials?

1. Bring a cliché to life (Snickers). The advantage of cliché’s is that everyone immediately "gets" them. The danger is in having your marketing become part of the cliché itself. Snickers brought the cliché of your friends comparing your effort on the football field to that of an old woman by showing Betty White on the football field. The tagline - "you are not you when you're hungry." It was a moment most guys can relate to and used humor to bring home their overall strategic message for the candy bar ... which is that it conquers hunger.

2. Make your competition the bad guy (Comcast & Teleflora) - Comcast had an ad featuring an overeager Verizon rep ready to bring out the heavy machinery to rip up your front lawn in an effort to install their new Fios lines. Teleflora poked fun for the second year in a row at their competitors who send flowers in a box. What both ads managed to do is give the viewer a very clear portrayal of the bad guy (ie - their competition) and therefore positioned themselves as the far better choice as a result. A relatively straightforward marketing tactic that is applicable no matter what your marketing budget happens to be.

3. Tap the cultural zeitgeist (Audi) - For Audi's ad touting their new A3 (a "green" environmentally friendly car), they showed a vision of a world where the "green police" were a real group. For anyone who has had a passionately believer in all things green as a friend or colleague, this concept of the green police is very recognizable. With the increasing attention from all angles (the media, your friends, your kids, etc.) on being green, all you need to do is make one simple choice to get the A3 and you'll be travelling in the faster green lane on the road and give yourself a "get out of jail free card" in relation to the environment. A powerful message.

4. Be the statement your customer makes. (Dodge & Flo TV) - I wrote on my own blog this week about the recurring theme in this year's Super Bowl of the "emasculated man" who is portrayed as having little of his own will left after giving up much of it to his wife/girlfriend. This is, of course, a caricature of men, however the more interesting marketing strategy is that both Dodge and Flo TV positioned their products as the "last stand" that a man can make to keep his manhood. In other words, buy a subscription to our service or get our car and you will be a man again. See how the power of making a big statement works?

5. Appeal to your customer's ego (Dove & Cars.com) - In stark contrast to the concept of the ads in #4, both Dove and Cars.com presented a much more positive portrayal of today's man. Dove pitched their product to men who are "comfortable in their own skin" and Cars.com used a child prodigy/man-of-the-world character to show how even renaissance men need help with buying a new car. The lesson from both was that sometimes you can also use the ideal vision of themselves that your customers have to position your product as the enlightened choice.

6. Don’t risk everything at once. In small business marketing, it is far safer and more effective to spread your bets by testing many different marketing methods. Homeaway.com took a big risk for a small company running their second Super Bowl ad this year. For your small business, it is far more effective to take patient interim steps. After your company has learned what works and doesn’t work in your marketing campaign, plot the next step. With limited capital, small businesses can’t afford the risk of a “one and done” strategy.

7. Track how the marketing tactic performed. Most companies have a variety of things they do to promote their business. Spending money on marketing is worthless unless your business knows what worked and what did not work. It is essential to get feedback on all aspects of your campaign. It is simple with today’s technology to ask the consumer in the targeted segment to go to your website or use a social media tool to judge results. The Ford Focus commercial encouraged the audience to cheer on their team online and “Watch, Compete, and Win."

Advertising Is A Poison -And We're Hooked On It

This article is by George Monbiot and appeared on The Guardia

We think we know who the enemies are: banks, big business, lobbyists, the politicians who exist to appease them. But somehow the sector which stitches this system of hypercapitalism together gets overlooked. That seems strange when you consider how pervasive it is. In fact you can probably see it right now. It is everywhere, yet we see without seeing, without understanding the role that it plays in our lives.

I am talking about the industry whose output frames this column and pays for it: advertising. For obvious reasons, it is seldom confronted by either the newspapers or the broadcasters.

The problem was laid out by Rory Sutherland when president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. Marketing, he argued, is either ineffectual or it "raises enormous ethical questions every day". With admirable if disturbing candour he concluded that "I would rather be thought of as evil than useless." A new report by the Public Interest Research Centre and WWF opens up the discussion he appears to invite. Think of Me as Evil? asks the ethical questions that most of the media ignore.

Advertising claims to enhance our choice, but it offers us little choice about whether we see and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it. Since Edward Bernays began to apply the findings of his uncle Sigmund Freud, advertisers have been developing sophisticated means of overcoming our defences. In public they insist that if we become informed consumers and school our children in media literacy we have nothing to fear from their attempts at persuasion. In private they employ neurobiologists to find ingenious methods of bypassing the conscious mind.

Pervasiveness and repetition act like a battering ram against our minds. The first time we see an advertisement, we are likely to be aware of what it's telling us and what it is encouraging us to buy. From then on, we process it passively, absorbing its imagery and messages without contesting them, as we are no longer fully switched on. Brands and memes then become linked in ways our conscious minds fail to detect. As a report by the progressive thinktank Compass explains, the messages used by advertisers are designed to trigger emotional rather than rational responses. The low-attention processing model developed by Robert Heath at the University of Bath shows how, in a crowded advertising market, passive and implicit learning become the key drivers of emotional attachment. They are particularly powerful among children, as the prefrontal cortex – which helps us to interpret and analyse what we see – is not yet fully developed.

Advertising agencies build on this knowledge to minimise opportunities for the rational mind to intervene in choice. The research company TwoMinds, which has worked for Betfair, the drinks company Diageo, Mars, Nationwide and Waitrose, works to "uncover a layer of behavioural drivers that have previously remained elusive". New developments in neurobiology have allowed it to home in on "intuitive judgments" that "are made instantaneously and with little or no apparent conscious effort on the part of consumers – at point of purchase".

The power and pervasiveness of advertising helps to explain, I believe, the remarkable figure I stumbled across last week while reading the latest government spreadsheet on household spending. Households in the UK put an average of just £5.70 a week, or £296 a year, into savings and investments. Academic research suggests a link between advertising and both consumer debt and the number of hours we work. People who watch a lot of advertisements appear to save less, spend more and use more of their time working to meet their rising material aspirations. All three outcomes can have terrible impacts on family life. They also change the character of the nation. Burdened by debt, without savings, we are less free, less resilient, less able to stand up to those who bully us.

Invention is the mother of necessity. To keep their markets growing, companies must keep persuading us that we have unmet needs. In other words, they must encourage us to become dissatisfied with what we have. To be sexy, beautiful, happy, relaxed, we must buy their products. They shove us on to the hedonic treadmill, on which we must run ever faster to escape a growing sense of inadequacy.

The problem this causes was identified almost 300 years ago. In Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, the hero remarks: "It put me to reflecting, how little repining there would be among mankind, at any condition of life, if people would rather compare their condition with those that are worse, in order to be thankful, than be always comparing them with those which are better, to assist their murmurings and complainings." Advertising encourages us to compare ourselves with those we perceive to be better off. It persuades us to trash our happiness and trash the biosphere to answer a craving it exists to perpetuate.

But perhaps the most important impact explored by Think of Me As Evil? is the one we discuss the least: the effect it has on our values. Our social identity is shaped by values which psychologists label as either extrinsic or intrinsic. People with a strong set of intrinsic values place most weight on their relationships with family, friends and community. They have a sense of self-acceptance and a concern for other people and the environment. People with largely extrinsic values are driven by a desire for status, wealth and power over others. They tend to be image-conscious, to have a strong desire to conform to social norms and to possess less concern for other people or the planet. They are also more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression and to report low levels of satisfaction with their lives.

We are not born with our values: they are embedded and normalised by the messages we receive from our social environment. Most advertising appeals to and reinforces extrinsic values. It doesn't matter what the product is: by celebrating image, beauty, wealth, power and status, it helps create an environment that shifts our value system. Some adverts appear to promote intrinsic values, associating their products with family life and strong communities. But they also create the impression that these values can be purchased, which demeans and undermines them. Even love is commingled with material aspiration, and those worthy of this love mostly conform to a narrow conception of beauty, lending greater weight to the importance of image.

I detest this poison, but I also recognise that I am becoming more dependent on it. As sales of print editions decline, newspapers lean even more heavily on advertising. Nor is the problem confined to the commercial media. Even those who write only for their own websites rely on search engines, platforms and programs ultimately funded by advertising. We're hooked on a drug that is destroying society. As with all addictions, the first step is to admit to it.

7 Things to Do When the Media Gets it Wrong

It’s one of the most asked questions in media training sessions: “Should I ever freeze a reporter out?”

When I hear that, says Brad Phillips president of Phillips Media Relations, I immediately think of a scene out of The Godfather or Fatal Attraction, complete with horse’s heads and boiled bunnies. I imagine my clients suddenly appearing as caped crusaders, known by names like, “The Wronged Spokespersons,” who exact their revenge on unfair journalists by “rubbing them out.” But freezing out a reporter is a dramatic step, and it often backfires. After all, don’t you think a company is guilty when a newscaster says, “We contacted representatives from the Huge Corporation, and they refused to return our calls?”

So, before making a decision to blacklist a reporter, here are some remedies that may solve your problem:

1. Show it to a neutral party. It’s an age-old truth: The closer you are to a news story, the more likely it is you will think it’s a negative story. Ask neutral parties to read, listen to, or watch the story and give you their views. Often, you will be surprised to find that the message you hoped would get through to the audience got through.

2. Talk to the reporter. Remember, reporters need access to sources to do their jobs, and good reporters are willing to hear their sources’ objections to a story (they may not agree with you, but they usually listen). Call the reporter, and ask if he or she is on deadline—if so, ask to schedule a time to call back. When you speak, remain polite regardless of his or her response. You will get a better reaction to a discussion about objective factual errors than subjective differences of opinions.

3. Write a response. In print journalism, you almost always have forums available to you for a response, such as a letter-to-the-editor or op-ed. If it’s an option, use it. Don’t repeat the original errors in reporting, since it just gives those errors more airtime—just articulate your point of view.

4. Speak to the editor. If you’ve gotten nowhere with the reporter, it may be a good idea to raise your objection with the reporter’s boss to insure he or she is aware of your complaints. Who knows? Perhaps you’re the fourth person to complain about the same reporter in a week. There is a downside here: no one likes to be complained about, and the reporter may take it out on you through future news coverage.

5. Respond with statements only. If it has become abundantly clear to most independent observers that the news organization in question is irrevocably biased against you or your organization, you have two choices: cut off all access, or respond with precision. It is almost always recommend the latter option, which means sending a short written statement in response to a reporter’s query.

6. Cut off all access. The only time you would consider cutting off all access is when you can honestly say that there is nothing to be gained by speaking to the reporter. Those cases may exist, but they are rare. Most of the time, good media management means finding solutions to working with the press—not avoiding them altogether.

7. Use social media. Cutting off access doesn’t mean you stop communicating. Instead, use social media to continue communicating with your key audiences—through all available channels, including your company website and blog, and your corporate YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.