Super or Bowl Marketing

We all love the Super Bowl ads. I’m not sure when it started, but I know that the ads are often the most talked about Super Bowl happenings. Millions are spent by these companies and their brand managers for 30 seconds during this game. Is it worth it?

As with all marketing, and never forget that that is what those ads are, some work, and some don’t. Which ones do you remember now after 24 hours? Which ones do you remember AND remember the brand it was for? Which ones do you remember AND remember the brand it was for AND thought it was good or positive? That one may have been worth it.

The Dot Com era was the golden era of Super Bowl ads. Also the biggest waste of marketing dollars ever. Great commercials, no idea who they were for or why. Viral video, huge social media numbers wasted. If you want to entertain people, start a movie company, otherwise market your brand.

Great marketing equals Super branding. Poor marketing equals dollars down the Bowl. Whether you are doing 5 cent Google adWords or 5 million dollar Super Bowl ads, wasted message equals wasted dollars.

Spotifying the Gap in Your (Social) Life

Spotify took some heat from privacy advocates for the way they were handling the interaction with Facebook. They quickly patched that by allowing you to listen privately. So if you do want to listen to, oh I don’t know, Boy George or “disco hits of the 70s”, you can do so without seeming to be uncool to your friends, real and virtual.

Got me thinking about other things you might do that you might not want a digital trail, but isn’t the lack of a digital trail going to raise a red flag? If you wanted to ditch your girlfriend and go to the football game with your friends, how you going to do that? Even if you don’t check in, tweet, post, take a picture that is geocoded, how you going to stop your friends? Even if you stop them, where did you say you were? Where are the check ins from there? Groupon? Foursquare? Even if you said you were sick, you should have checked WebMD. You my friend, have a digital gap that needs to be filled.

This reminds me of the the way the Russians used to find our quietest subs, by looking for places in the ocean that had no noise. Those areas had no noise because our subs were so quite they made no noise, and so big, they blocked the background noise. We solved that by placing mics on each side of the sub that picked up the ambient noise and broadcast it on the other side of the sub through a speaker. Effectively filling the gap with noise. That is what we need, a gap filler.

So if we, the digital social generation, ever want to do anything cool on a “sick” day again, we had better develop a way to post ambient life noise, or the lack of  a digital trail may get us in trouble.

Online Hell

Will it ever end? Seems not. We have all be on online events that drone on and on and on. What is your first thought when you are stuck in this situation? Well mine is what a bad job they are doing. A presentation should be dynamic whether done in person or online. Don’t let the fact that you can’t see the people you are speaking to be a crutch to do a bad demo.

How do you fix this? Have dynamic content and plan an exciting demo then practice with the environment you will be using to do the demo, online or not. Nothing worse than having a great demo flow that get stopped because someone doesn’t know how the “pass the ball”.

A good plan properly executed is the key to any demo, face to face, online, or recorded.