I knew my plan to flee America to escape the Super Bowl craze had backfired when I found myself in front of the Monday night pre-recording surrounded by twenty Australians eating homemade chicken wings and hollering more enthusiastically than any American audience I’d ever seen. But despite my un-American apathy for the sport itself, I am fascinated by the cultural phenomenon that the Super Bowl advertising campaigns have become.
Obviously we can’t see American ads during the show here in Sydney, but at BRIGHT we monitored the developments from cyberspace as brands built anticipation using crowdsourcing.
It’s a clever strategy: provide audiences with a sense of ownership over the content while lengthening the duration of their campaign and subsequently the depth of engagement. And with $4 million as the going rate for a thirty second spot and an increasingly ad-immune public, crowdsourcing campaigns are a practical move for getting the most of an investment. This year’s campaigns demonstrate a variety of approaches to the same concept of leveraging input from consumers as a brand engagement mechanism.
Content Generation
Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign sent out its seventh annual round of invitations to consumers to create 30-second ad spots for the chance to have it aired during the Super Bowl. This approach to crowdsourcing has proven to be wildly successful for the snack giant, a feat Partner & Executive Creative Director at Red Tettemer + Partners Steve O’Connell explains in recent Forbes article:
“With something like Doritos, there isn’t really anything the client wants to say other than ‘Doritos are tasty’,” explained O’Connell. “All you need is a fun joke. For other clients who are not their category’s leader – they have to explain why you should buy their product over someone else’s or why you need that product – something that can’t be handled by the crowd.”
This makes a lot of sense—it’s risky to leave such a strategic endeavour like brand differentiation in the hands of the public, but Doritos doesn’t have to worry about achieving distinction in the eyes and stomachs of snack consumers. This year’s winning ad “Goat 4 Sale” features a man, his Dorito addicted goat and a long line-up of Doritos’ signature crunch audio clips.
Celebrity Endorsed Engagement
Companies have to put a lot of trust in their consumers in order to utilise content generation crowdsourcing successfully, and some realise the power of their brand alone may not entice enough participation and quality input. That’s where good ol’ celebrity endorsement comes in. Lincoln knew they lack the cool factor that enables Doritos to garner such high engagement from their consumers, which is why they recruited Jimmy Fallon to crowdsource input from Twitter for their Super Bowl ad in an attempt to subtract about thirty years off their average driver and break into a new luxury vehicle buyer market. The tweets were used to create their “Steer the Script” ad, which you can view here:
While Pepsi might have the following to launch a successful crowdsourced campaign without a celebrity, they chose to revive the pop culture element in former marketing campaigns by offering up the opportunity for winners of their photo contest to appear stage with Beyonce during this year’s half time show.
Gamification
Coca-Cola’s crowdsourcing approach utilises one of the current hottest trends in digital marketing—gamification. Coke produced a sixty second video depicting three teams -- a band of Cowboys, a gang of "Badlanders" and a pack of Vegas-style Showgirls- -racing through the desert toward a Coke bottle. At the end of the clip, viewers are encouraged to go vote for which team they’d like to win in true choose-your-own adventure fashion.
Conclusion
As every marketer knows, analysis is a critical component of a good campaign. According to Ace Metrix’s survey of 500 consumers, Doritos’ goat ad made the top five most effective ads of the Super Bowl, while Lincoln’s “Steer the Script” ad took the number six slot for the least effective ad list. So did a goat really trump Jimmy Fallon, or is this proof that crowd sourcing just isn’t an effective strategy for every brand?
