Web Master If you got off the couch to grab another cold one from the fridge just after the coin toss, then you probably missed it, but the winner of Sunday’s Super Bowl was the hometown favorite, Budweiser.
According to a reader poll conducted by USA Today, the best game-day ad featured a zebra reviewing an instant replay in a football game between two teams of Anheuser-Busch Clydesdale horses. The ad was a take off on the officiating controversy that occurred after the NFL admitted that its referees missed a pass interference call in the end zone in the closing minutes of the San Francisco 49ers v. the Giants playoff game.
Ryan Boyle, a first year MBA student at the Olin School of Business, was one those that gathered at Knight Executive Education Center to watch the Super Bowl ads on the big screen as part of the Olin Marketing Associations annual Ad Bowl, an event that raised money for United Way. Boyle’s recipe for taking home the ad trophy:
“Two things-a good ad first attracts attention to it and provokes some kind of emotion. A good ad enables a person to remember it, and remember the brand that is being promoted. Secondly, it needs to be consistent with the brand that is being promoted.”
Boyle agrees that Budweiser’s first spot was a success.
“It was really funny-it was a hot topic-it promoted a happy, fun image that is consistent with the image of Anheuser-Bush, so I think that was a good ad,” said Boyle. He added, “I personally, though, really liked the Fed Ex commercial.”
The Fed Ex commercial, which came in 11th in the USA Today poll, was a spoof of Cast Away. In that movie, Tom Hanks’s character, a Fed Ex employee, is stranded on a deserted desert island with a Fed Ex box that he refuses to open. During the movie the audience wonders what’s inside. The ad reveals that the box would have led to Hank’s rescue.
“I thought that ad was effective because it played on a popular question from a movie that a lot of people have seen, and played off a question that a lot of people have thought of before,” said Boyle.
David Ferman, another first year Olin MBA, picked yet another commercial as Sunday’s Ad Bowl winner. Goodwin picked Sierra Mist’s ad, which was third in the polls, featuring a zoo baboon that catapults into the polar bear exhibit to cool off as his favorite. He points out
the use of the internet, which allowed viewers to choose the ad’s ending as being a particularly savvy marketing tool.
“A lot of what you saw today was new product introduction,” explained Ferman. “Sierra Mist, for example, is vamping up their ads. They were segmenting the market via the Internet by having you choosing the ending. They were targeting a younger market that is Internet savvy as consumers of Sierra Mist.”
Listening to these MBA students speak, one almost begins to believe that dropping $2.2 million on a single ad is serious business. Luckily, some professionals from Zipatoni, a St. Louis based ad-agency, were on hand to remind the students that Super Bowl ads are essentially, according to Jim Holbrook, the company’s president, about four things: gratuitous use of celebrities-the more irrelevant the better; naked body parts-male and female, because “we’re politically correct”; anything invoking the Three Stooges; and an insanely high production value.