Did you hear that there was a football game at the Beyonce concert last night?
Did you watch the game for the game, or for the commercials?
It turns out that almost as many people tune in to watch the Super Bowl as tune in to watch the commercials and half time show. Over the last 2 decades, the spectacle of the Super Bowl commercial has brought us frogs that croak the name of a popular beer, a scantily clad Danica Patrick somehow hawking internet domain names, and not a few memorable jingles.
Then Dodge brought us this last night: The great Paul Harvey reading "So God Made a Farmer."
My Facebook wall was crowded with dozens of comments about THIS ad from the moment it aired. Most of them were positive, and understandably so (the one negative comment was that it presented a very "white" America, which may or may not be the case, and I won't comment on it here, though you are free too).
Paul Harvey reads an emotional ode to the industry that defines and supports a nation -- even Socrates himself said that farming was the most noble pursuit (in Xenophon's Oeconomicus). That's striking. And it went on for 2 minutes, in a time when a 30 second spot costs over 4 million dollars.
Dodge gambled and spent probably over $20 million on a gamble that they could prompt a powerful emotional reaction in people that would look nearly selfless.
I think it worked.
Then, this morning, as I was grabbing my coffee and a paper, the USA Today (a.k.a. the "McPaper") caught my eye. The top of it looked the same, but the only picture I could see on the folded over paper was the sky, with the words in a typed-serif font reading, "So God Made a Farmer."
It turns out that it's an advertising wrap, a "false" front cover that wraps the real McPaper. But it caught my eye, and called to mind the stirring emotional imagery of that ad.
The inside is a full read of the piece over the face of a farmer.
For a company that sells trucks at $35k a pop, I think that Dodge has hit a home run. Dodge just dug it's feet in deeply to the collective minds of many in the truck-buying demographic (many of whom have never worked a day on a farm, of course).
I am not in the truck buying demographic, but if I were, I would think very strongly about Dodge based on this ad (and I'm generally smart enough to not be swayed by ads - being in advertising usually makes one critical of any attempt to persuade using advertisements.
So why did this work?
Because it was beautiful.
Because it was moving.
Because it didn't try to sell you a truck.
In fact, that's why most people tune in to see the Super Bowl's commercials - each one is a miniature form of art, usually not trying to get us to understand why their product is better than X, Y, and Z, but merely to get us to enjoy ourselves and connect that enjoyment with out brand.
That is where advertizing is going.
Sure, people still need to know that you can give them a root canal when they need it, or fix their drains when they're clogged, but above and beyond that, the medium of the advertisement qua advertisement is waning, and waxing in it's place is infotainment.
Your advertising should always do one of two things (seldom both together):
1) Tell those customers who need your service that you can do what they need you to do.
2) Entertain them and ask nothing of them.
The former is what advertising in the Yellowpages does, or getting found on Google.
The latter is what mega-brands do.
Because everyone already knows who McDonalds is. Everyone already knows what Dodge makes.
