Commercials Are for...

Last night’s Super Bowl commercials made me wonder about what commercials are for. It’s always been my thought that commercials are to make you buy something, inform you about a product, improve the image of a brand, or give you a call to action. The incredibly expensive commercials yesterday mostly made me…do nothing. I had no desire to look up information about a product, I certainly had no desire to buy anything (even the Doritos commercial didn’t make me wish we had a bag at home). I did watch the car commercial with Jerry Seinfeld and think that I wanted to catch the episodes of his old show with the Soup guy…but I don’t think that was the purpose of the spot. I did watch the Go Daddy spot and wonder where Danica was going to race this year…is it NASCAR or Indy? There were commercials that were powerful (GE) and there were commercials that were just plain silly (end of the world car commercial). There were commercials that were depressing (Clint Eastwood car commercial which reminded me that most of the problems in Detroit were as a result of bad decision-making by auto executives) and there were plenty of beer and soft drink commercials. But today, in the clear light of morning, there should also be some Boards of Directors that ask some very pointed questions of CEOs and Chief Marketing Officers about why in the world they dropped $3.5 million dollars (plus the creative cost) for those spots?

Here’s what the NY Times says about the commercials.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/business/media/super-bowl-commercials-from-charming-to-smarmy.html

Tell Me Another Story

Yesterday I heard Mark Russell of Eric Mower and Associates give a wonderful presentation on marketing to the Entrepreneurial Society of Central New York. As a part of Mark’s presentation, he spoke about the power of stories as it relates to your brand and showed the brilliant piece called The Man Who Walked Around the World. Great piece of storytelling that makes you just want to keep watching. If you get the chance to hear Mark talk about marketing and branding, make a point of doing that.

Marketing and the Kind Snack Bars

About a year ago, a friend of mine and I were sitting in a coffee shop and we were both drinking coffee and having a snack. I had purchased an overpriced and stale pastry, while my friend had a snack bar with an interesting wrapper that I had never heard of. He eventually took pity on me and gave me one of his Kind Snack Bar’s, and from that moment on I was hooked. I buy them now by the carton load at Wegman’s and I make sure to have some in my briefcase whenever I’m headed to an airplane. So naturally, when the current issue of Inc. Magazine carried a story about the founder of the company, Daniel Lubetzky, I made sure to read it. Take a look at “The Way I Work” feature, “I’m obsessed with marketing through random acts of kindness.”