I call it the sin of success: an early domination which makes the business feel like a champion, able to take on all comers. Time and again, this vanity blinds the conqueror to the real and growing presence of a threat. Sears somehow missed WalMart; AOL somehow missed everybody (but particularly Facebook, which also was ignored by Friendster).
Corporate brands often run into trouble, or into a strong new competitor, or simply run out of steam. Companies then put significant effort into rebranding or developing a new corporate brand positioning, sometimes with a new corporate brand name, often with a new visual identity. Too often, once these efforts are complete, they move immediately into telling the world what the brand (now) means.
A few reflections on grading the ads:
- Very divergent views in USA Today, WSJ and NYTimes
- However, unclear what standards each are using
- USA Today viewer meter continues to trouble me because it always tilts to entertaining (if not gross) ads with animals, so we get more and more of those types of ads
First Quarter:
Ads about as weak as the Patriots at the start of the game.
Just as a team has to (and can only) play against whomever is scheduled, so do the ads compete against whomever else decides to pony up.
For those of you watching the Super Bowl ads at home, here is the way I keep score:
How should we separate the winners from the losers in Super Bowl advertising?
Some advertisers measure success via social media mentions for USA Today’s public, semi-scientific poll. But these ratings may have little relationship to how one would rationally try to assess the ad’s real impact.
This is definitely the year in which introducing ads before the Super Bowl has exploded. Before the advent of social media, the idea was to keep your Super Bowl ad secret and advertisers who simply aired a pre-existing ad were generally panned.
While the focus on the Super Bowl will continue this week, I thought that, as Florida finishes voting, the ever-changing sentiment of voters in this election year offers a really interesting comparison between polling/research and social media monitoring.
In the old days, when the Super Bowls begat the Super Bowl ad game (and, alas, I was alive at this creation), the marketers’ competition was all about creative breakthrough.