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Well there it was — another Super advertising day — and a good football game to boot.   There are tons of day after opinions on yesterday’s ads, and their insights are probably better than mine. I looked through a number of sites and wanted to recommend the following.

1. The Wall Street Journal, which has its own reader poll and comments from a wide range of advertising experts in “Auto-Industry Ads Score at the Super Bowl” (February 6, 2012 – non-subscribers may need to click here). The article lauds the “Halftime in America” ad below — while their early poll results favored the Seinfeld/Leno Acura NSX ad (also below).
2. As of this moment, the USA Today online admeter (not their focus group which reports tomorrow) shows a top five with the two Doritos ads (created in a contest), Bud Light’s “Weego,” M&M’s “Just My Shell,” and Volkswagen’s “Dog Strikes Back.”
3. You can also find plenty of pundits all over the web, but I found one of the more thoughtful analyses at the Influential Marketing Blog in the post titled “The Best and Worst Of Super Bowl Marketing Strategy 2012” (February 6, 2012).

Read one or more of these articles — they offer sometimes contradictory critiques.  Then offer your own opinions — but back them up with good reasons.  Which ads do you think are most effective?  least effective?  Why?  What makes for a good Super Bowl advertisement?

I guess this campaign is more than a year old now — but it is fresh and new to me.  John St. is an agency based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is hard to call any agency an “ad” agency as most — like John St. — do all kinds of promotional efforts. The clever video below demonstrates a wide range of its services in a cute way. It actually fits as a B2B and B2C example at the same time — and it also demonstrates integrated marketing communications.

The Wall Street Journal asked some advertising execs what they see coming in 2012 — and you can read about it in “*&%@#! and Other Ads Trends for 2012” (January 4, 2012 – non-subscribers may need to click here) — or by watching the video below.

Choose one of the trends and evaluate its impact on your career planning.  What can you do differently to better position yourself for the future — assuming the trend you pick is right?  Part of the idea of this exercise is to encourage you to be forward-looking in your career planning.  The world is changing rapidly, so you want to be anticipating and preparing for the future.

The title of this article from Adweek says it all “The 10 Most Watched Ads of 2011 on YouTube” (December 21, 2011). We featured several of these on Learn the 4 Ps over the last year.  This might give you something entertaining to watch over break.

It sure sounded like a great idea.  Here at Colorado State University, we got to hear the whole plan in a speech by Coke CEO Muhtar Kent.  The idea, draw attention to global warming and the plight of polar bears.  The bears have been a Coca Cola holiday symbol for almost 100 years — so the actions also fit with the brand’s heritage.  Coke did this by changing the iconic red cans to white for the holidays.  It sure sounded like a good idea.  Unfortunately, the new cans confused consumers — especially Diet Coke drinkers who confused the white can with their familiar silver Diet Coke cans.  This article, “Bad News, Bears:  Coke Pulls Back on White Cans in Holiday Campaign to Save Polar Bears” (brandchannel, December 1, 2011) describes many interesting elements to the story.  For example, by monitoring social media, Coca Cola marketing managers heard complaints early.  This case is also a demonstration of a low involvement product that consumers buy out of habit.   In the end, it probably marks a mis-step by the soft drink giant.  But I would say, if you take chance, you will make mistakes sometimes.  And this whole outcome, like the New Coke introduction 25 years ago, may yet generate positive publicity for the brand.

What do you think?  Should Coke have pulled back on the cans?  Was it a good idea in the first place?  Was this risk foreseeable — or just part of the risk of being an aggressive and creative marketer?

The iPhone has considerable market share and mind share among consumers. So how do you break into that market? Maybe you start by copying Apple’s iPad and iPhone. Then you try to differentiate your phone with a larger screen and 4G connection speed. Samsung’s Galaxy 2 S phones have received good reviews.  But then how do you battle that Apple mystique?

These Samsung ads don’t appear to be targeting Apple loyalists who stand in these lines — they are already too loyal to Apple.  And obviously it hits a niche that just hates Apple — but Samsung and Android phones already have a reasonable share of those customers.  The question is, does it work with the larger market segment of customers looking for smartphones and not Apple lovers or haters?   What do you think?  Should Samsung be promoting phone features or image?

This provocative idea is put forth by Aaron Shapiro in his new book Users Not Customers.  The video below is an ABC News video with Shapiro, who is also a consultant.   I have not read the book and feel we must be cautious expecting that all businesses can use Google and Facebook as models.  Online firms like this have a unique cost structure that plays some role here.  Still, I think Shapiro has some interesting ideas that would benefit many businesses.

What do you think?  Should all firms eliminate advertising?  If not all firms, what types of businesses should heed this advice?

This ABC News video describes both how consumers are changing their behavior — and how major marketers like Target and P&G are responding.  The video is short at only 2:39 — though you do have an ad before it starts.

What companies might do well in this economic environment? How would you respond if you were Best Buy? Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream? or Coca-Cola?

There are plenty of articles (even a whole issue of BusinessWeek) paying tribute to Steve Jobs this week.  As much as we respect Jobs, we weren’t going to join the chorus because we didn’t have anything new or marketing-specific to say.  Then we found this 1997 video of Steve Jobs talking to Apple staff.  Jobs had recently returned to the company he founded (he had been unceremoniously booted in 1985).

In the video Jobs explains what he thinks “marketing” is — actually explaining positioning — and introduces the new “Think Different” campaign.

“To me, marketing is about values,” he said. “This is a very complicated world, a very noisy world and we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember us. No company is. So we have to be very clear about what we want people to know about us.”

Some of you may not know that Jobs returned to a company with crippling losses and record low stock prices back in the mid-1990s. Apple’s market share in computers was less than 5% (it now may be over 15% based on recent numbers), there were no iPods, iPads, or iPhones.

What do you think of the video and Apple’s “Think Different” approach?  For what kinds of products would this approach to positioning work best?

STA Travel is a discount travel agency for students.  What is STA thinking when it creates an ad like this?  What is their promotion objective?