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Ah, Super Bowl season. While some viewers tuned in to watch the big game last month, more eyeballs are focused squarely on the ads, with brands pulling out all the stops – and all the marketing dollars – to be part of the pack.
This year, we saw aliens, a puppy-monkeybaby hybrid and Christopher Walken as part of the line-up, with brands falling over each other to take the mantle of 'the best Super Bowl ad of 2016'.
It's a huge moment for US marketing. It raises the bar for advertising and pulls back the curtain on some of the best creative executions of the year. But it also raises the questions: does the Australian market want its own advertising mega-event to supercharge creativity? And do we need a Super Bowl of our own?
About Lachlan:
Back in Sydney after eight years in the UK and NY working on the world’s biggest brands, Lachlan is passionate about brands’ roles in transforming the way we enjoy and navigate the world.
No, absolutely not - we don’t need our own Super Bowl. What we do need to do is reinvent ourselves and fast. To move with, or preferably ahead of, the demands of a rapidly shifting market and consumer.
To do this we need to change the way we do things so we can best answer the increasing complexity of the problems we’re asked to solve.
The agencies getting this right are less Super Bowl and more David Bowie. By that I mean they’re in a perpetual cycle of reinvention, constantly evolving how they solve problems by developing proprietary IP, methodologies and capabilities that seamlessly combine to deliver great customer-centric ideas and experiences.
Far more critically, they seek out and value effectiveness, regarding it as the true yardstick of what we do and what we should aspire to.
The laggards are those stubbornly holding onto the old Mad Men methodologies, process and people. They’re haplessly trying to use them to solve the same complex problems, yet remain bewildered when the answer to every problem still turns out to be a 30-second spot.
It’s somewhat predictable, therefore, that these remnants of the old industry are the same people holding onto the belief that the annual ‘burning of millions of dollars in 30-sec increments’ all in the name of a foreign sporting event few of us even
understand (and which, ironically predates even Don Draper himself) is somehow the holy grail of what we can do, or at the very least the most creative expression of it.
I couldn’t disagree more.
About Peter:
A highly awarded creative director, Peter works across multiple disciplines, specialising in business solutions, social, digital, integrated campaigns and PR.
I would love something in Australia to highlight amazing creative work that would drive clients and agencies to be innovative, original and take risks. I am less concerned about this happening via a medium like live television though. My pitch would be for Australia to get behind a Super Bowl-type event within the social, digital and mobile spaces. And we are lucky that there is such an event with an audience that dwarfs that of Super Bowl’s. Let me introduce you to e-sports - a rapidly growing global community of video gamers playing and watching game matches online.
With games like DOTA 2, League of Legends and CS:GO getting viewer numbers in the 20s of millions and prize pools in the 10s of millions, giant brands like Google, Intel, Coke, Red Bull and Doritos are all now moving towards becoming major sponsors and what’s interesting is that these brands are also making some of the best Super Bowl spots. So, how do we get all this Down Under?
We host the Olympics of e-sports here in Australia because we nailed it the last time and have a strong reputation for putting on giant sporting events. This will give us an amazing platform for a digital, social and innovation Super Bowl all of our own.
About Kieran:
With over two decades of global agency experience Kieran’s passion for all things creative matches his philosophy of ‘collaborate or die boring’. He believes this simple truth leads to the best work and a more interesting life. He was at Leo’s NYC before joining JWT in December 2015.
The Super Bowl is the dress up party of advertising, it’s where brands give their alter ego permission to let loose. If you’ve ever sat down to pen an ad for the Super Bowl you’d know the feeling of not just writing an ad but writing a super ad. This doesn’t always result in better advertising but often you start in the farthest reaches of your imagination and then add movie sized budgets to anything that moves.
The American viewing audience want, maybe even need, to love these ads that fill the gaps in the start/stop game of the NFL - it’s this symbiotic relationship that has led to the idea that people tune into the Super Bowl for the football as much as they do to watch the ads. However, if you’ve watched the Super Bowl in an American pub or even a house party you’d witness an indifference to the ads as they are played in real time.
Ironically, Super Bowl ads are more and more about blogs and YouTube rankings than viewership during the game - it’s often too noisy to even hear the ad, but the media spend puts you into the pre and post game conversation.
So, does Australian advertising need it’s own Super Bowl? The short answer is yes please. We are a nation of larrikins that no longer tell jokes, brands need this public permission to act out and bet big. The key to the popularity of the Super Bowl commercial is that entertainment is put before everything and this is what we need to embrace. Less rational, and more emotional.
About Simon:
One of Australia’s most awarded creatives, he is able to quickly respond to large-scale and unique briefs. During his +25-year career, Simon has worked on a range of iconic Australian campaigns and for major agencies, both here and abroad, including running his own successful agency.
The Super Bowl, like all NFL games, lasts about three hours, but on average the ball is actually in play for less than 12 minutes. During the other 168 minutes spectators have nothing to do except ingest mountains of fast-food and tsunamis of soft drinks, and having been on this diet all their lives most of them need a large shoehorn to get into their seats and couldn’t get out of them unassisted if the stadium caught fire. Meanwhile, something similar is happening in every living room in America, as Mr and Mrs C. Potato and their bloated offspring wedge themselves into furniture designed to accommodate twice as many Scandinavians.
For an entire afternoon half the population is quite literally a captive audience, so you can’t blame agencies for putting a bit more effort into the ads. There’s no equivalent roadblock in Australia. The Melbourne Cup may stop the nation, but advertisers know that half of it gets so drunk before the big race the next day they can’t remember which horse won let alone what was advertised immediately before or after it.The kind of sporting event that might excite Australian marketers more would be one played and watched by the only demographic with any kind of disposable income these days – retirees. Maybe it’s time the networks started televising the final of the Australian Open Lawn Bowls Championship and spruiking it to clients like Viagra, P&O and Grecian 2000. We could call it The Superannuationbowl.
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