It’s that time again! In honor of the big game, we’re reposting our top 10 Super Bowl ads of all time. Enjoy!
The Super Bowl is back—meaning it’s time to stock up on Buffalo Chicken dip, kick back in front of the TV and watch some of the best commercials you’ll see all year. Or, catch some football. Whether you’re a sports fanatic or not, the creative ads airing between tackles are always highly anticipated. As well they should be—advertisers shell out close to $3million for a 30-second spot.
While some ads miss the mark, many make such an impact that we still talk about them years later. We’ve compiled a list of our top Super Bowl ads ever for your very own trip down memory lane: Read More »
As the year draws to a close, we’re wrapping up our five favorite ads of 2011. This year’s best ads almost all focus on something we called a few years back: that brands, in order to avoid downward price pressure and maintain share of wallet given recessionary habits, were going to have to make a concerted effort to inject shared values into their marketing communications, and become more than sellers of goods, but enablers of a better life.
Three of this year’s best hit those buttons, we think. As for the other two: a little levity never hurt anyone. Here are our thoughts – let us know what you think in comments!
This year, as they’ve done the past two years, the popular Consumerist blog asked its readers: “What are the worst American ads of 2011?” A few weeks ago, they released their results: ads from Luv’s, Summers Eve, AT&T, and Geico were ignominiously awarded spots in the list of finalists, while the Luv’s ad, a gleeful celebration of, well, poop, was named the “Worst of the Year”.
But we actually happen to think these ads aren’t too bad. I doubt any will ever win an award, but many get their point across – and shore up brand differentiators – extremely well, despite the little things that pushed the Consumerist’s readerships’ buttons.
This weekend, most of our readers will celebrate Halloween – a celebration of the macabre and scary in life. In honor of that, we’re posting some of marketers’ biggest fears. Here are five we came up with, along with ways to fight back. What else are you scared about? Let us know in comments. Read More »
Walt Disney World is a vacation destination beloved by many (including me). Its themed rides, immaculately dressed characters, and song-and-dance-filled shows are hard for most brands to emulate, but there are several non-princess-based strategies marketers can use to boost their own brands: Read More »
In western countries, economic and business history have interacted to create a certain kind of consumer environment – the people that buy your products have certain expectations and ideas as to how those products will work and what the buying experience will be like.
But it’s important to recognize that this history isn’t universal, consumer expectations and experiences are very different elsewhere, and stepping out of the context of your own market is an awesome way to generate innovation and growth.
Last year, we looked at the ways that western companies are repositioning and localizing their product mix for the growing Chinese market. It was a collection of very cool ways that companies incorporated local knowledge and preferences into their product and marketing efforts. But the land of even crazier consumer products is just across the East China Sea – Japan.
We collected five cool, unusual, or surprising things you can buy in Japan – hopefully these will jog your imagination a bit:
1) Odori-don
Odori-don is a Japanese word that means “dancing squid”, and it’s a dish that lives up to its name: a (very) fresh squid is placed atop a bowl of fish roe and steamed vegetables. When soy sauce is poured over the squid, the salt in the sauce activates still-live nerve endings in the squid’s tentacles – leading to the spectacle you see in the video above.
2) Mobile Television
In 2006, the Japanese government worked with broadcasters and mobile phone makers to create a broadcast standard capable of being streamed live to cell phones. It’s a little different than video on American phones: in the States, video is delivered over wireless data networks, and is typically downloaded first (although a few live-streaming services exist).
In Japan, videos is delivered over a network similar to free-to-air television in the States, resulting in better picture quality, less risk of dropped service, and a more…James Bondian viewing experience.
3) Robots. Everywhere
Remember the bit about economic history above? That’s a big reason why Japan, as a society, generally relies more on robots than other advanced countries: a very low birth rate, combined with a traditional resistance to immigration, has led to a bigger role for automation and robot workers.
Going along with Japan’s love of automation, vending machines occupy a central role in consumer life, particularly in big cities like Tokyo. Vending machines sell things like flowers, umbrellas, and even fresh eggs:
5) Fighting Obama toys
When President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, Japan’s Gamu-Toys (link in Japanese only) released an absurdly-detailed action figure of the new US leader. Complete with a machine gun, a pistol, two brightly colored ties (red and blue), and an outlandishly-oversized American flag, this cool figurine is ready to bring hope and change to the world – by force, if necessary.
The NFL is back, and, for much of America, not a moment too soon. I’m a hockey guy myself, but I’ve played a fair amount of (American) football in my life, and last Thursday, as I watched the season kick off, I realized that football coaches and marketing planners have pretty similar jobs.
Coaches and planners go into intensely competitive situations (football stadiums and market economies, respectively), lead teams with certain strengths, certain weaknesses, and a limited ability to change those things, adapt a “game plan” without knowing much about how the other side will react, and end up being judged on things that may or may not be their responsibility. They have to be meticulous enough to draw up most of the game in advance, but flexible and agile enough to call new plays should conditions warrant them. Most of all, they have to have the ability to get everyone on the same page, and motivate and marshal their teams to execute on the plan.
Football teaches, I think, 3 big things to marketing planners and managers: Read More »
A few months back, I was helping an older relative clean out their attic – a space home, among other things, to nearly every issue of National Geographic released for the last 40 years. There is, of course, no way to stumble upon a cache of old magazines without thumbing through a few. The journalism itself was instantly-recognizable – most things you could transpose to a modern National Geographic without too much incident – but what was astounding were the differences in advertising.
Marketers and advertisers have spent over 100 years trying to communicate with customers in modern, recognizable ways, and during that time the language we use to do that has evolved. Customers now don’t need everything spelled out – they react instantly to small symbolic cues, rich images, and a memorable tagline – but consumers of previous eras didn’t have the rich symbolic vocabulary necessary to do that. The result was advertisements that are much more literal – and maybe more informative, in a strict sense – than the ones we have today.
We’ve collected ten of the coolest vintage magazine and TV ads we could find. Have others? Post them in the comments! And make sure to check out our resource center on getting the most out of agency partnerships, so maybe your company will be on a list like this in 2061. Read More »
The following is a guest post from Matt Lind of our sister program, the Customer Contact Council.
It’s been just over a year since we brought you the “Funniest Customer Service Spoofs”, an entry that continues to rank among the most popular in Wide Angle’s history. And if we learned (or rather, confirmed) anything from this diversionary post, it’s that customer service professionals have a healthy sense of humor about themselves and their jobs—even though we seem to get more than our fair share of ridicule.
Let’s face it, though. Despite the fact that we all strive to eliminate poor experiences that are frustrating for customers, from an outsider’s perspective these situations can be…well…absolutely hilarious. And it’s not just standup comedians and sitcoms that are leveraging the comedic fodder to be had; on the contrary, more and more companies are pushing customer service to differentiate themselves—and using some spectacularly bad examples to illustrate their competitors’ allegedly inferior service.
With that in mind, we’ve dug up a few more customer service-related spoofs, pranks, and advertisements that are sure to keep you laughing…unless, of course, you’re that frustrated customer on the other end of the line: Read More »
(the following is a guest post from Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for heads of sales)
Nobody can sell an idea better than television’s Don Draper, the creative advertising genius in the show Mad Men. And after watching nearly the entire series in an embarrassingly short amount of time, I think I know what makes him so good: Don Draper is a Challenger™. He understands his customers’ businesses better than they do, and isn’t afraid to tell them. And if a customer ignores his advice in favor of bad ideas, he’ll likely fire them.
Here are three things Don Draper knows that most sellers and corporate executives haven’t figured out:
The “customer is always right” mantra has long driven marketers and salespeople to bend over backwards to satisfy insane customer demands, only to then wonder why customers are disappointed when they get exactly what they’d asked for.
Not Don Draper—he leaves that attitude for customer service. Don Draper knows that if he were to create the advertisement the customer asked for, he’d end up producing the same ad as every other agency. Not a recipe for loyalty.
Our research – as well as practical experience – indicates that customers do not always know what they want, and serious work is needed to unearth unarticulated and poorly-understood desires within the targeted company or segment. MLC members, see how companies like Reynolds and Reynolds and Texas Instruments achieve customer understanding beyond articulated needs.
Too much productivity can be a bad thing.
Don Draper is famous for taking naps at work, lying on his couch until inspiration strikes. In one episode, when new management tries to clamp down on employees’ down-time, Don fires back, “You came here because we do this better than you… and part of that is letting our creatives be unproductive until they are.”
The lesson for marketers isn’t that we should start napping instead of working, but simply that there’s a limit to how much activity we can squeeze out of ourselves before it takes a toll on the quality of our work. In complex sales, MLC research shows that Marketing and Sales need to be creative and innovate on deals, and reps need to take time to research customers before charging in. But creativity can’t be forced. A whole body of recent scientific evidence proves what Don Draper knew instinctively: that the brain needs time to relax and wander in order come up with good ideas.
MLC members: check out our ideation topic center for more on developing innovative marketing and sales approaches.
Emotion trumps reason in sales.
Everyone these days seems to want a better ROI calculator. “If only we can quantify the value we bring,” the thinking goes, “we can convince the customer to buy.” But Don Draper knows that people buy because of emotion, not reason; they use ROI to justify in their heads a decision they’ve already made in their gut.
Instead of pitching customers on his ads’ ROI, Don Draper tells stories that connect to their deepest emotions, and forcefully challenges customers to see their business in a new light. Our work on customer loyalty confirms that products’ emotional benefits drive greater differentiation than their functional benefits. Financial impact matters, but it’s a piece of the puzzle, not the Holy Grail.
CEB's areas of expertise span the core functions found in large corporate, midsized, government, and financial services organizations worldwide.
CEB's Marketing Leadership Council is a membership organization comprised of over 400 of the world's leading companies, serving 36,000 marketing professionals and growing. Our proprietary research yields insights that upend conventional wisdom and change the way marketing leaders address long-standing and emerging business challenges.
It’s that time again! In honor of the big game, we’re reposting our top 10 Super Bowl ads of all time. Enjoy!
As the year draws to a close, we’re wrapping up our five favorite ads of 2011. This year’s best ads almost all focus on something 
