Pickles and pizza, chips, ‘guac,’ and wings — these are a few of (Super Bowl) partay-ers fav-or-ite things. In fact, they are considered top of the list must-haves for the big day’s event. According to the Bloomberg News an estimated 34.9 million Americans threw their own Super Bowl parties in 2011, and 61.2 million people indicated that they had planned to attend a party.
If advertising is the language of business, and the way of doing business changes, it is only logical to think that advertising would change as well. If you were in an environment where you spoke only English and jumped into a bilingual community, you would want to learn the second language, right? In order to be successful in your new environment, adapting your ways would be necessary. Like learning a new language, advertising needs to learn how to properly conduct itself in the new environment.
As the week comes quickly to an end, everyone is preparing their plans for Super Bowl Sunday. Media Day for the players was on Wednesday, where the media gets to ask questions about game day preparations, what they have been doing the past week, and coaches give injury reports and roster updates. As of the writing of this post, the spread is -3 with the New England Patriots as the favorite to hoist up the Lombardi trophy.
Remember when Super Bowl commercials were simply Super Bowl commercials — i.e. spots that ran during the actual Super Bowl? They're becoming a rather distant memory these days, as more and more brands take to tweeting, teasing, and even previewing their spots well before the big game.
Though Absinthe, the infamous green elixir with nicknames like "the Green Fairy" and "the Green Menace," has been available around the world for some time, there hasn't been a brand ready to make a global push to market and distribute the drink. Enter Pernod-Ricard, the drink maker that says it was one of the first that made absinthe commercially available in 1805, is planning a global campaign to introduce its absinthe brand, Supéri-eure. Pernod-Ricard claims that its brand was the one go-to absinthe for the artists Van Gogh and Picasso. In fact, it plans on emphasizing its cultural impact by collaborating with artists and musicians.
The advertising spots for the Super Bowl are attracting a lot of buzz, and few more than the spots from Honda and H&M. Honda just revealed that it is the company behind the You-Tube hit of Broderick's reprise appearance of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and this week H&M released the advertisement that features Mr. Soccer himself, David Beckham, in his underwear.
The fun thing about the Super Bowl is that when it comes near, mainstream media shifts its coverage to advertising. Advertising gets hit from all angles by the media, too: what's good advertising, what's bad advertising, why does our society need advertising, the invasiveness of advertising, and so on. Many pieces are off point, and some are not. It is important, though, for the advertising industry to speak up when such media critics pop their heads into our domain to give their two cents about advertising. One such head is Esquire's Stephen Marche, who wrote a piece today about bringing back good advertising.
