While there may be some debate about whether or not Osama is dead, if you read the marketing and business press, there is no doubt about the fate of the :30 commercial: Stick a fork in it—if not today, then soon, and forever. The slayers are not just the ubiquitous remote, but most recently TiVo and the personal video recorder, estimated to be in 50 million homes by 2010.
There’s a fundamental flaw in the argument though. Americans have always been in love commercials, as long as they excite us. We can’t resist their visual style, their syntax, their compressed humor. Just consider how the language of commercials has found its way into our language, time and time again. In fact, long after the TV spots themselves have gone stopped running—and in some cases the products themselves—we still employ their catch phrases. "It’s not your father’s so-and-so" has become a standard way of expressing a new turn on an old trick. And "I’m not a blank-blank, but I play one on TV" is still used to feign self-deprecation. The reason for this is simple: We love to consume, and commercials are both triggers for—and objects of—consumption.
But the best, most conclusive evidence of our romance with commercials is the media spectacle that Super Bowl advertising has become. The level of anticipation has become steroidal. We’ve all heard our non-advertising friends talk about how they love watching the game for the advertising. We’ve read the next-day reviews and surveys that appoint the winners and losers. Three million people voted in an AOL poll for their favorite commercials. Clearly, there isn’t much zapping going on during those commercial breaks. And that’s just the point. Why is the industry able to engage and provoke consumers for just one day out of 365? It’s not that consumers are any less interested during the balance of the year, it’s that advertisers themselves are less interested.
Let me explain what I mean by that. The Super Bowl is supposed to unleash the most imaginative and innovative creative forces in the industry. And because Super Bowl sponsors recognize that gladiatorial environment, it becomes a competition for freshness, and a measure of their willingness to forgo the grinding pressure of the focus group and labyrinthine approval process that bring us the mediocrity and mush that we are only too happy to zap into oblivion.
The Super Bowl also taps into the competitive spirit of creative people—are you going to let the writer and art director at the agency across the street show you up?
So imagine what would happen if the industry challenged itself to raise the level of consumer expectation every day. Imagine if consumers actually leaned forward during commercial breaks to see what was next. It could happen. There are enough good creative people around, even though many have been sucked out of the industry by cost cutting, by the ready acceptance of boring work, and by the allure of TV, film and even dot-coms. Nor is it a matter of having unlimited production budgets. Ideas don’t have price tags attached to them.
What’s making it easy for TiVo to threaten the existence of the TV spot as we know it is a failure of nerve on the part of clients and the giant agency groups that pander to them. They have both, for the most part, failed to recognize that in today’s consumer world, a commercial must have two parallel lives—as a selling structure, and as a living cultural artifact.
It isn’t enough anymore for a commercial to be merely convincing, it must have deep associative value. If I don’t feel proud of the commercial, I will feel ashamed of the product, and I won’t buy it, no matter how logically convincing it might be, according to whatever fancy research methodology is currently in favor. And it’s not like there aren’t early glimmers of this.
Even Procter & Gamble is wondering if their commercials reach deep enough into the consumer psyche. "Success at Cannes is more predictable [of market success] than [copy] testing," said Mathilde Delhoume, global ad development director for baby care, expressing what once would have been heresy for a P&G-er.
A couple of years ago, with the advent of reality TV, the experts pronounced the situation comedy dead. Well, I hear more people talking about Curb Your Enthusiasm than Joe Millionaire.
The lesson is simple: form isn’t the problem; it’s the content. Or lack of it. So instead of rushing towards all sorts of guerilla, under-the-radar marketing, ignite our infatuation with advertising by doing a better job of seducing us.
A 365-day Super Bowl would be great for the foot-long hero business, but even better for advertising.
