VideoNuze Posts

I promise, this will be my last post on the Super Bowl ads. I suspect some of you are getting sick of hearing about them, but the reality is that there are some cool follow up tidbits emerging that I think many of you will be interested in.

First a clarification. I accidently omitted mentioning Audi as another Super Bowl advertiser that had a broadband component to their ad. Their mention of "TruthInEngineering" at the end of their spot was so quick that I didn't even notice it. That's a shame, because when you visit the mini-site there's a lot of great video, including one lasting 3 minutes all about the making of the ad.

Ken Liebeskind has a good interview with Paul Venables, who is the founder and co-creative director of the ad agency that created the spot and the videos at the mini-site. I really like how well developed the whole "Truth In" concept has been executed in the mini-site. My only gripe with the execution of the TV spot is that just flashing "Truthinengineering.com" at the end for a quick second is insufficient to really optimize traffic flow. Though Venables says traffic is way up since the game, I think it would be far higher had they focused on the URL longer.

Meanwhile, some interesting follow up stats that have bubbled up. comScore is reporting that 13% of Super Bowl viewers watched an ad online and that 13% visited an advertiser's web site. Of those who visited an advertiser's web site, 38% visited GoDaddy.com, 22% Coca-Cola and 21% Pepsi.

My first post, from this past Monday, "My Rant About Super Bowl Ads" can be seen at the site. It is a real privilege to be selected for the "Voices" section, and I'm completely thrilled!

OK, today no rant, just one more little insight to offer from Super Bowl ads.

Yesterday I highlighted the 5 ads (out of the total 52) which had a broadband component. They were:

GoDaddy - promoting Danica Patrick's "Exposure" banned ad and other videos

TideToGo - promoting "MyTalkingStain.com" a fun microsite

SoBe LifeWater - promoting "Thrillicious.com" a microsite where 2 more spots with the dancing lizards can be seen

Sunsilk - promoting "LifeCantWait.com", a microsite with a UGC contest which is not yet active

Pepsi - promoting "PepsiStuff.com", where users can download videos and music

I'm able to track click-throughs to each link I share in these emails. I thought you might be interested to see a graph of these clicks from yesterday. Note they're shown as an index, not actual numbers, with a starting index value of 100 for Sunsilk.

As you can see, VideoNuze email recipients expressed a pretty strong interest in the GoDaddy.com Danica Patrick ad. I'm sure many of you are not surprised since it has a pretty overt potential payoff for visitors.

The point is this: I think SoBe LifeWater missed a huge opportunity to keep viewers engaged, which would have both improved the ROI on their Super Bowl ad spend, and also deepened viewers' engagement with the brand. While the Campbell spot was hugely entertaining, it did little to power ongoing engagement. Contrast this with GoDaddy, which no doubt had people pouring into its web site since the spot ran, with ongoing chatter and brand-building taking place.

I love the Super Bowl ads as much as anyone. I never stop being amazed by the creativity and humor on display during each year's big game. This year was no exception: screeching squirrels, a strutting heart, shrunken heads, talking babies, the list goes on. For what Super Bowls ads are and always have been, they're terrific. My problem is that I believe broadband video allows Super Bowl ads to be much more than what they are and always have been. But the agency world does not seem to be getting this message.

Two years ago I wrote "The Ten Million Dollar Super Bowl Ad?", where I outlined a scenario under which a 30 second spot could someday go for ten million bucks. How? By combining the best of brand advertising (the big emotional play) with the best of online advertising (the big measurable, performance-oriented play).

I wrote in that post: "What I envision is that the 30-second spot during the game will become the viewer's introduction or re-introduction to the brand or product. Numerous online, broadband-centric tactics will follow, with video being the center of the action. In football terms, the 30-second spot will morph from throwing a long pass (which is accompanied by high drama, but low probability of an actual score) to executing a more consistent ground game (accompanied by lower drama, but a much higher probability of an actual score). With this added measurability and a direct feedback loop, marketers will have much less anxiety about whether to ante up for the big game (and therefore the price will spiral upward).

I thought agencies and marketers would see this light and rush toward it. Boy was I over-optimistic. After watching all 52 Super Bowl ads this morning (thanks AOL), I am completely dismayed to report that, by my count, only 5 ads had any broadband video component:

GoDaddy - promoting Danica Patrick's "Exposure" banned ad and other videos

TideToGo - promoting "MyTalkingStain.com" a fun microsite

Life Water - promoting "Thrillicious.com" a microsite with a 2nd spot with the dancing iguanas 

Sunsilk - promoting "LifeCantWait.com", a microsite with a UGC contest which is not yet active

Pepsi - promoting "PepsiStuff.com", with Amazon (ok, more focused on music than video)

All of the other 47 ads, representing tens of millions of dollars of clients' money, followed the same game plan from Super Bowls' past: go for either the clever, the funny or the gross, in an attempt to create buzz and fond memories for fans.

For me, this hidebound behavior showcases agencies at their most disappointing: unable to break out of the box, recognize new consumer engagement opportunities for their clients or embrace new technologies. Their inability or unwillingness to be more progressive is at the heart of why the whole advertising industry is in such chaos, with an increasing share of total spending shifting to online each year.

Well, here I was waiting for news to officially cross the wire that Yahoo was acquiring Maven Networks for $150-$170 million (heavily rumored in the blogosphere yesterday and for weeks now) so that I could weigh in, when instead what emerged this morning was that Microsoft is making an unsolicited offer for Yahoo. Quite a day for Yahoo. (Note, I'll have more on Yahoo-Maven if and when that becomes official).

Today's big news is Microsoft's unsolicited $44.6B offer for Yahoo. Talks between the companies have been off and on for a long time, and it looks like Microsoft finally got fed up with the dithering at Yahoo and decided to make a pre-emptive move. Steve Ballmer's letter to Yahoo's board and today's release is here.

The deal is all about increasing scale to compete more effectively with Google in the online advertising space. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have lagged Google badly and have spent billions in the past year on ad infrastructure acquisitions. Yahoo immediately brings MSN lots of new traffic, which can be monetized with both search and display advertising.

Though Ballmer's letter also highlights "emerging user experiences" such as video, mobile, online commerce, social media and social platforms" down the list, as the fourth area of potential synergies, I would argue that the upside in video is actually the most strategic benefit of the deal. Why?

The concept of scale, i.e. being able to both reach gigantic audiences and drive massive traffic from them, is absolutely essential for broadband video advertising to become core part of the marketing mix for big brands. Unlike search-based advertising, which has been driven by long-tail advertisers, broadband video advertising is going to be driven by big brands. That's because, notwithstanding the growth of overlays and other formats, pre-, mid- and post-roll ads are going to be with us for a while to come, and they are expensive to produce. The average garage-sized business isn't going to be making them.

Big brands spend tens of billions of dollars on TV ads. Shifting a meaningful part of this spending to broadband delivery is essential for broadband's growth. Brands spend on TV because that's been the only way for them to buy enough audience reach. Though they're beginning to trickle some spending over to broadband, the central obstacle to increasing their broadband spending is that there simply is not enough high quality, targeted video inventory for them to buy in order to achieve their reach objectives and therefore materially impact their businesses.

This is a theme I hear all the time, and just heard many times in the ad-related sessions I attended at NATPE earlier this week. Microsoft knows that to tap the long-term broadband ad opportunity in branded video advertising, it must offer advertisers greater reach, along with interactivity, reporting, social features, etc. This is all the more urgent because MSN and Yahoo are already playing catch-up to YouTube which still drive approximately 40% of all video views, a dominant market position.

MSN has worked hard to cross-promote MSN video in the rest of the site, and this has driven improved user experiences and impressive traffic gains. Yahoo, which has been mired down with a dysfunctional and bloated bureaucracy, has been far less coordinated and effective in video, leaving lots of room for MSN to make improvements.

You won't hear much about video as a key motivator for the deal because Wall Street, which is Microsoft's key audience to persuade, doesn't give a whit about long-term strategic positioning. It only cares about short-term financial metrics like dilution, earnings growth, cost-reductions and so forth. But behind the scenes, I'm giving credit to Microsoft. I think it is reading the tea leaves correctly about how the broadband video ad market is going to unfold and how to get MSN positioned properly for long-term success.

What do you think? Post a comment!