With over 100 million viewers for this year’s Super Bowl, NBC charged $5 million for each 30 second spot and reaped $500 million in advertising revenue sales from this one game.
Certainly this is the championship for football players as well as ad makers. For those who create commercials and the brands which pay for them, this is the Big Dance, too. Perhaps, it’s even better than winning a Clio for Advertiser of the Year. For a winning ad on this stage, assures fame for both the brand and the creative agency.
So, who wins this year’s award for best commercial? Honorable mentions go to PepsiCo/Frito-Lay for their Doritos ad with Peter Dinklage mouthing to Busta Rhymes and scorching up the floor. Also worthy of note is Budweiser for bringing water to victims of natural disasters. But, the winner this year is … Tide for their creative, "meta" public relations program!
You see, Tide needed some good PR communications to reverse a recent spate of horrible media coverage concerning teenagers challenging each other to eat Tide laundry pods and post it on YouTube. The “Tide Pod Challenge” was devastating to Procter & Gamble’s image and caused the type of internet marketing no company wants to experience. So, they needed a creative content agency to erase that from the minds of consumers. And this year’s Super Bowl ad campaign did just that.
But, the ads didn’t start like typical laundry detergent commercials. One started out like a car ad, one seemed like it was for beer, another looked like it was for a truck, one seemed like an Old Spice Ad, another like a Mr. Clean commercial, and then after all the actual Alexa ads, Tide managed to show up again in something that looked like an Amazon Alexa ad.
Tide did a "meta" thing and made a game out of their brand by challenging you to find them in every other commercial. Viewers were constantly looking to see if it was a Tide ad, or not. So they were all Tide ads. Brilliant!
So, for Tide making us think outside the box and the commercial frame, by turning every comercial into a Tide ad, and for helping all communication companies realize you can successfully divert attention from negative social media branding, the award for best Super Bowl Ad campaign this year goes to … Tide!
"Tide's in, dirt's out!”
Readers of this blog also found this topic very helpful: Social Media's Impact on News: Reliability Issues and Revenue Shifts
For more insights on Digital PR agencies and digital transition, please access, “How The Best Digital PR Firms Add To Pipeline Leads.”
Author: Mike Emerton, Founder, BridgeView Marketing