The US’s most watched annual sporting extravaganza – the Super Bowl – highlighted the significant potential of out of home advertising to ingeniously reach millions of consumers captivated by the media’s promotion of the event. It also showed how men and women viewed the ads – differently.
Continental Outdoor Media CEO, Barry Sayer, said South African outdoor media companies can harness South Africa’s ubiquitous love of sport to engage viewers ahead of a major sporting event.
“Ahead of the Super Bowl, brands across industry sectors invest more in promoting their products than at any other time of the year. This year, we saw how outdoor adverts embraced digital elements to differentiate brands. Each year, the creativity just gets better and blows consumers away,” said Sayer.
Sayer cites various examples: leading up to the Super Bowl, H&M painted a 150ft image of David Beckham on 34th Street, New York, to advertise Beckham’s new ‘bodywear. It took two weeks to complete – just in time for the Super Bowl. Then H&M placed branded over-sized bags in key locations across London to generate a buzz. The final commercial – which was televised – aired at the Super Bowl.
Media researcher, Robin Hafitz of Open Mind Strategy in the US, also used the Super Bowl to find out what women want – in terms of ads.
“At OpenMind, we found ourselves wondering about whether men and women shared the same top and bottom picks. After all, women notoriously make more than half of the purchase decisions in America (80%, according to some measures), and women were 46% of the Super Bowl viewing audience this year. In fact, 51 million of the 111 million viewers were female (to put that in perspective, the Oscars, considered by many advertisers to be ‘the female Super Bowl’, had 38 million total viewers last year),” says Hafitz.
According to FEPE International, Madonna took over 1 600 digital out-of-home screens across the US, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Singapore, Belgium, Finland and the UK to launch her new single. The song was simultaneously played on various radio stations. The music video features cheerleaders and American footballers throughout and was released just days ahead her half-time performance at the Super Bowl.
“International outdoor advertising trends indicate that we have to embrace media convergence to be more inventive, and ultimately to differentiate our brands amid information overload and clutter. We also have to be really astute when it comes to using sporting events as a platform in which to promote brands,” said Sayer.
According to Hafitz, “women are particularly likely to follow the marketing game as much as the football game (66% vs. 45% of men) – which means they’re likely to be paying more attention to the multi-million dollar efforts advertisers are putting on the air,” she says.
These are the results, according to the women polled:
“The big standout was that David Beckham’s ad for his new H&M line was our #1 winner among women (By comparison, it was close to the bottom in the USA TODAY Ad Meter). Apparently, what’s good for the gander is good for the goose.
“These responses were typical:
“Looove the fact that finally they want to sell us s*** using a very hot man!”
“Like the objectification of a male – as opposed to the gawd-awful Teleflora and Fiat spots – but not sure it’s gonna move the ‘bottom line’ (no pun intended!)”
“Of course, not every woman enjoyed this close look at Victoria’s family jewels (“He’s getting a bit old. I was a little uncomfortable. There are younger players with fewer tattoos.”)
Most of women’s other top picks fell in line with the favorites of viewers in general. In other words, this year, women, like men, went to the dogs. They loved the Doritos dog, the Skechers dog, the Volkwagen dog, and the Bud Light dog.
“You can’t go wrong with dogs. In USA TODAY’s Super Bowl coverage for the past 20 years***, ads featuring animals win the #1 slot fully half the time, and ads featuring dogs rise to the top five times. This year, women weren’t as kind to other animals, saying, to Coke: “Enough with the polar bears,” and, to CareerBuilder: “Didn’t you use chimps last year?”
To view the ads, go to https://www.jcdecaux-oneworld.com/2012/02/super-bowl-2012-outdoor-adverts/
