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Your brain on dru…I mean Super Bowl ads

February 8, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Short on time? Here’s the Bottom Line!

Please note that this article was written prior to Local Na8ion’s re-launch and as such the content may not be relevant for today’s audience of local marketers.

Everyone has a great time playing the role of Monday Morning Quarterback on the big game AND in the last decade that has included the T.V. commercials that run during the Super Bowl. We’ve all come to see the commercials as an integral part of the big show. There are whole legions of people who watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials. Er, my wife and I are pretty close to this latter group (no, we’re not Football haters, we just really love advertising!).

What does this have to do with local interactive advertising? Well, because online marketing is all about interaction and consumer engagement and online marketing has proven again and again to be a big winner here. The former leader in generating emotional response and engagement was Television. Anything we can learn about how these ads effect consumers is information we can use when crafting our own interactive campaigns.

Like you, I’ve read lots of reviews on the commercials with the consensus being that Fedex won this year’s battle of the commercials contest (of course there are some dissenters in this opinion). People also seemed underwhelmed by this years spots. Shannon and I really like to analyze the ads on our own and draw our own conclusions about the best ads before reading other opinions.

Our reactions.

First, we weren’t as underwhelmed as so many seemed to be.
And our pick for the best ad? The Disney World “NFL Dreamers” commercials showing various football players practicing their “I’m going to Disney World!” refrain for after winning the game. We immediately connected with the ads and felt they were the clear winner. We seem to be in the minority - at least in terms of the media pundits. Maybe we’re all wet but this story on CNET Tuesday showing that the Disney World ad was the most engaging gave us some validation.

“The researchers at UCLA and FKF Applied Research used fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, to measure the activity of brain regions associated with key emotions in viewers.”

A couple of points that really jumped out at me. First, the Disney commercials scored the highest when it came to engaging the viewer, followed by the Sierra Mist airport security ad. What is a little weird is how the Disney ad went from a clear winner on the first viewing to a big loser on the second viewing (a larger drop than many other second viewings). So, the Disney ads made the list for both most engaging and least engaging.

Since we follow the online recruitment space we were also really interested to see that CareerBuilder’s monkey commercials also make the ‘least engaging’ list. When you look at the actual data it looks pretty bad.

Our favorite local TV commercial? Well, there was only one to choose from. In our market we saw a commercial for an exclusive local golf community. How about you?

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the overwhelming reaction I have to this data is how ALL the ads produced high levels of anxiety! The Disney commercials, along with the others have far larger responses in the areas of threat than positive aspects like reward. I’d love to see this kind of brain study performed on interactive ads (yeah, it’s probably been done - I just don’t know of it) to see how the greater targeting and interactivity of the web would change these dynamics.

Any researchers out there want to partner up with us on this research?

See Spot Run *and* make new friends at the park…

February 8, 2006 | 2 Comments

Short on time? Here’s the Bottom Line!

Please note that this article was written prior to Local Na8ion’s re-launch and as such the content may not be relevant for today’s audience of local marketers. Disclaimer: Although I am not affiliated in any way with Spot Runner I am a long time friend with one of their current executives (although my interest in Spot Runner predates my friend’s employment with them).

If you’ve read my previous post on Spot Runner, the internet ad agency hoping to bring T.V. spots, and someday soon internet T.V. spots, to local advertisers, you’ll know all about what they’re up to and why it’s important to the local online and local interactive recruitment space that we write about here on LOCALna8ion and over on our sister blog EXCELER8ion.

News is slated to come out later today that Spot Runner has signed a strategic relationship with Cendant Real Estate Services to offer their TV advertising services to its 260,000+ affiliated agents and brokers. With 9,000 brokerage offices Cendant is THE player in the real estate space and includes brands we all know and love like Century 21, Caldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby’s.

There are a couple of things that I really like about this move. First off they’re smart to go after the huge real estate vertical, typically the domain of local newspapers and their online sites. There’s 11 billion advertising dollars in them thar hills.

Second, Spot Runner is smart to plug-in to a major incumbent in the local business infrastructure, you know, the one that drives our entire U.S. economy while big business gets all the glory. Realtors are everywhere and people in the local community pay attention to what they do. Other local advertisers will notice what’s happening and potentially hop on board the $500 T.V. commercial bus. This move could definitely generate some great word-of-mouth marketing for Spot Runner in the local community if managed right.

Watch for more interesting moves from Spot Runner in the near future as they build up their leadership team (I hear they’re looking for a Sales VP right now), products and local relationships.
Hmmm, let me see, where should they go next: autos, education, local mid to large sized retailers, similar sized companies looking for employees, throw in some service businesses and well, that’s another 50 billion or so in local advertising dollars to keep them busy for a while…

BMW backfires, Germans gasp, Dr. Google mandates a tune up in order

February 7, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Short on time? Here’s the Bottom Line!

Please note that this article was written prior to Local Na8ion’s re-launch and as such the content may not be relevant for today’s audience of local marketers.

CNET reported today that search engine Google had blacklisted the German BMW site for violating Google’s standard terms of service on web spam. BMW Germany was using an aggressive SEO tactic to improve rankings with text laden, key word infused “doorway pages” deployed to catch the eye of search engine bots like Google’s but then (and here’s the no no) were redirecting users from those text pages to more content rich sites than the pages that had been indexed. It’s pretty interesting to read Matt Cutts’ post on this topic since he is the center of the story on the Google side. Matt is head of Google’s web spam department and his post shows the actual examples of the BMW pages and explains all the details behind the story.

I can’t imagine that BMW is happy to have been completely removed from Google – even if the expulsion is temporary. Next, BMW has to ‘fix’ their transgression and relist their site which they’ll no doubt adjust quickly.

It was a good reminder to us to leave the manipulative tactics to someone else when executing your local search marketing tactics (even if you’re a small to medium sized local advertiser that is less likely to catch the eye of Google’s web spam group). In today’s Internet world manipulation is outed quickly and dealt with harshly. Yes, I think you could easily make the argument that BMW didn’t do itself any harm in this instance with their brand since they were serving up pages that were still highly relevant - just more content rich. It stands to reason that users would have found their ultimate search validated.

That’s why we would put this in the no biggie category while noting that the edges of the envelope were in fact found. It’s good to know where those edges are in real life and I imagine BMW is probably not too unhappy to be pushing the limits a little. After all, their engineering and automotive tradition has always been about making cars that perform at the outer edges of performance. In this case their Internet Marketing engine just needs a tune up.

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