Super Bowl is well known for it’s big budget creative TV spots. As I mentioned yesterday, these 30 second spots don’t come cheap, this year they cost $5 million a pop. Huge consumer brands like Doritos, Coca-Cola, Colgate and Toyota tend to dominate Super Bowl advertising.
While Adobe sold it’s software to marketers through the hype of Super Bowl, they didn’t actually advertise during the event. Some tech brands did put their budgets on the line in the hopes of turning hype into sales.
My favourite of the Super Bowl 2016 tech brands was website building software Wix.com. They joined forces with Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda in an amusing spot that even references another classic ad, the Old Spice Man.
The spot is accompanied by, unsurprisingly, a Wix website Start Stunning.
Start Stunning Mircosite
A microsite within a microsite, of course they had to create the actual noodle site
A career quiz linked to Facebook forecast I’d make a good party planner, and mocked up my new website to encourage the career move
Old Spice spokesperson Isaiah Mustafa approved of the reference:
Yet, I can’t help questioning the alignment between the fan of Kung Fu Panda and Wix customers. The Dreamworks partnership (not to mention giving up 3 seconds for the movie plug at the end) would have been costly. It’s made the ad stand out, but will Super Bowl viewers remember Wix or Kung Fu Panda?
Other tech brands that featured in this year’s Super Bowl:
- PayPal: Proclaimed that old money was out and new money was everyone. Reckon they PayPal’d their $5 million advertising bill?
- Amazon Echo: Missy Elliot and Alec Baldwin teamed up to promote Amazon’s Siri-like internet assistant
- Intuit Quickbooks: In the B2B version of Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl“, Intuit gave their Super Bowl spot to their small business customer Death Wish Coffee.
- Fitbit: Choose an economical (smart or boring) choice of running an ad that appears to unrelated to Super Bowl and probably wasn’t specifically created for the event.
- Apartment.com: In an opposite direction is the Super Bowl weirdness we love to hate. A singing Jeff Goldblum is craned on the roof of a New York apartment to meet up with Lil’ Wayne. My main takeaway was Goldblum looks old… oh and apparently this exposure was 100% wasted on me:
What do you think – is Super Bowl a good way for tech brands to raise their profiles?
techmarketer.org 