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Sunday, January 30, 2000

Super Bowl: The Oscars of TV ads

Dot-coms dominate, but so will beer

 

In every commercial break during last Sunday's NFL playoffs, the same complaint overpowered the sound from the big-screen television:
   "Why can't we have BEER commercials?"
   Not that this group of 30-something - OK, 40-something - guys speaks for all of Corpus Christi. But they very well may speak for guys across America who watch football regularly and will be watching the Super Bowl today.
   All in this particular group of serial barbecue abusers have been to college, own investments and use the Internet regularly. And none wanted to see another cryptic commercial from a dot-com or an investment firm.
   Today, they'll be disappointed.
   These guys would rather see beer-drinking frogs and Rebecca Romjin-Stamos. Last week, each time they saw the commercial where the Bud-drinking guys screech "Whazzup?" into an intercom, someone from the group shouted, "Hey, they copied us!"
   Today, they won't be disappointed.
   High-dollar 30-second spots
   Dot-coms and telecoms will dominate Super Bowl commercial time today, says Don Gillis, general sales manager for KIII, the local ABC affiliate that will air the Super Bowl. But so will beer and cars.
   Thirty-second national spots for today's game cost $2 million, Gillis said. A 30-second local spot was available for $3,000.
   The Super Bowl has become "the Oscars of commercials," Gillis said.
   "It's kind of become its own entertainment area. You really want to stick around and you don't want to go to the bathroom. You might miss one of the greatest commercials."
   One will be from EDS, the Plano-based company founded by Ross Perot. It's a send-up of westerns, depicting cowboys driving a huge herd of cats across the plains. What any of that has to do with managing computer systems for government and businesses is anyone's guess. But the advance word is that the commercial will get your attention and make you laugh.
   Good commercials
   That means it will meet at least one of the three criteria that Gillis said a commercial should achieve to be successful: "The three most important characteristics of a message is, number one, did it get the viewers' attention; two, did it convey valid positioning in the market; and three, did it sell the product."
   If the commercial is as funny as Associated Press television writer Frazier Moore says it is, it also should score big in an area that Gillis says is important to Corpus Christi-area viewers.
   "My opinion is that humorous ads work real well in this market," Gillis said. "It works better here than in Austin, which is more young-skewed, technocrat."
   Advertisers trying to reach the local market should base their advertising styles on the programs that viewers prefer, he said. "And typically the shows they like to watch are entertainment sitcoms."
   The Super Bowl also is a good time to launch a business or product, he said, "and that's why you see all the dot-com ads."
   The shaky-camera-style Nike commercial with track star Marion Jones ("Oh, you want to race?") that aired repeatedly during last week's games got the attention of my football-watching buddies. They liked watching Marion Jones but they couldn't tell what the commercial was about.
   "It missed one of the key components: meaningful information," Gillis said. But meaningful or not, surely they'll still be talking Monday about cat herding. How it will affect their buying habits remains to be seen.
  

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Tom Whitehurst

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