Last night, I was talking to a couple guys at my gym (Results on U Street - a predominantly gay gym) and they thought the ad was just really stupid more than anything else. First of all who eats a Snickers bar like that? Gay guys don't even eat that kind of crap so it's not like we were the target audience. Is the idea that the two men are so horrified by having kissed that they have to basically self-flagellate offensive or borderline homophobic? I'd argue yes, however, the clips on the Snickers website were far more disturbing. I'd love to have been in the room for that brainstorming session when they were story-boarding the idea. "Shouldn't we have him, like, swoop in on the Snickers bar and take the whole thing in his mouth...?"
Edited By flipp525 on 1170770754
Superbowl commercials
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Eric
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Penelope wrote:And while the news was good for some Super Bowl advertisers like Anheuser-Busch and Nationwide Financial, it was unusually bad for the Masterfoods division of Mars. Complaints about its Super Bowl commercial for Snickers candy — showing two men committing violence against themselves after they accidentally kiss — led the company to decide late yesterday that it would withdraw the spot.
Masterfoods, which received complaints from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign that the commercial was homophobic, also took down related material on a special Web site (afterthekiss.com).
A comment on YouTube:
I'm gay and a former international leader of a GLBT org. and this is very funny stuff. ... I know that the HRC (Human Rights Campaign ) will condem this soon but that's how they raise money, no different than the Bible beating fools in a recent national election that scared Americans into believing that same sex marriage would somehow harm their hetrosexual marriage.
Bottom line, if promotional stunts are what butter HRC's bread, then fine. Condemn the ad and think it's doing the world a service. But it's also one reason why I've never felt compelled to donate to their cause.
NYTimes:
Thanks to the Web, the Scorekeeping on the Super Bowl Has Just Begun
By STUART ELLIOTT
FOR the teams that play in the Super Bowl, the day after the game is reserved for planning victory parties or promising, “Wait till next year.” For Madison Avenue, the day after has become D-Day, given over to discussing and debating the myriad data that become available about the response to the commercials from the game.
And while the news was good for some Super Bowl advertisers like Anheuser-Busch and Nationwide Financial, it was unusually bad for the Masterfoods division of Mars. Complaints about its Super Bowl commercial for Snickers candy — showing two men committing violence against themselves after they accidentally kiss — led the company to decide late yesterday that it would withdraw the spot.
Masterfoods, which received complaints from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign that the commercial was homophobic, also took down related material on a special Web site (afterthekiss.com).
The Snickers commercial offers a cautionary tale about the echo chamber Super Bowl advertising has become. Years ago, Super Bowl spots pretty much disappeared after the one or two times they were shown during the broadcast. Today, they have afterlives because they are being made available on dozens of Web sites, written about on blogs, forwarded to friends as video clips and even scrutinized for the brain-wave patterns they generate in viewers.
“The opportunity to amplify the value of your commercial beyond game day is invaluable,” said Joshua Stylman, managing partner at Reprise Media, a research company that tracks how advertisers use search-engine marketing on Web sites like Google and Yahoo to complement their TV campaigns.
As of yesterday afternoon, visitors to a special AOL Web site devoted to the Super Bowl spots (aol.com/superbowlads) streamed them more than 15 million times. There have also been more than 1.6 million unique visitors to ifilm.com since Sunday to view the commercials there.
Figures from Akamai Technologies, which is tracking Web site traffic for about two-thirds of the marketers that bought spots during Super Bowl XLI, showed that visitors rose steadily from Sunday through yesterday — meaning that the commercials were the start of the selling process rather than the climax.
Traffic yesterday averaged close to 300,000 visitors a minute, according to Akamai, almost twice the average of 160,000 a minute who came to the Web sites during the game.
“In the old days, you had to put extra sizzle into your commercial to get people to notice it, such as elaborate production values or a celebrity spokesperson,” said Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at Cymfony, a company in Watertown, Mass., that specializes in brand monitoring.
“Now, you have to put all this other stuff around your commercial to make it the kind of spot consumers want to talk about,” Mr. Nail said.
Among those tactics are putting up microsites, dedicated Web sites different from brands’ general sites, like afterthekiss.com, which was separate from Snickers.com; uploading deleted scenes, production clips or other material to video-sharing Web sites like YouTube.com; and offering consumers ring tones, screen savers or MP3 audio files related to the commercials.
The three advertisers whose Super Bowl spots are being talked about the most, according to preliminary data from Cymfony, are Anheuser-Busch, the Doritos brand of snack chips sold by Frito-Lay and Nationwide Financial. All three surrounded and supplemented their Super Bowl commercials with elaborate Web-based campaigns.
All three also pushed the boundaries of Super Bowl advertising by not keeping the contents of their commercials secret before the game, long a traditional tactic to build interest. For example, Nationwide posted its entire spot, featuring the rapper Kevin Federline, on its Web site (nationwide.com), six days before Super Bowl XLI was played.
“The Web is all about diffusion of information, where nothing is a secret,” said Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a unit of the Nielsen Company that measures the buzz, or talk value, of ads. “You could say the Super Bowl has caught up with the Web.”
“The name of the game next year,” Mr. Blackshaw predicted, will be “priming the attention, not making consumers wait for the ‘magic door’ to open.”
As a result, he said, there could be more contests like the Crash the Super Bowl promotion sponsored by Frito-Lay, part of PepsiCo, which asked consumers to create a Doritos spot for the game and asked the public to select a winner from among five finalist spots.
The vote was so close, said a spokesman for Frito-Lay, Jared Dougherty, that just before the game began the company decided to run two spots rather than one. The runner-up’s commercial, called “Check Out Girl,” was added to the lineup along with the winner’s spot, called “Live the Flavor.”
The gamble seemed to have paid off: Not only did the Doritos spots finish high in the Cymfony survey, they came in fifth in the Nielsen BuzzMetrics survey of online conversations about Super Bowl ads, behind Anheuser-Busch, Nationwide, Snickers and FedEx.
Both Doritos spots also finished among the 10 most-viewed moments of the game in households that used TiVo digital video recorders to watch the Super Bowl. “Live the Flavor” — created by Dale Backus and Wes Phillips of Cary, N.C. — was fifth and “Check Out Girl” — created by Kristin Dehnert of Pacific Palisades, Calif. — was eighth.
“My observation is that it’s a high-risk strategy” to ask consumers to create commercials for so high-profile a venue as the Super Bowl, said Todd Jeunger, vice president and general manager for audience research and measurement at TiVo.
“I was a little surprised it could work so well,” he added.
The most-watched moment in the game in TiVo households was a humorous Bud Light commercial about immigrants featuring the comedian Carlos Mencia, by LatinWorks. In second place was a Bud Light commercial by DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, in which a game of rock, paper, scissors turned violent. That spot was among more than a dozen that were centered on cartoon-style violence or slapstick shtick.
“It looked like they pushed to get attention by jolting people,” said Joshua Freedman, a co-founder of FKF Applied Research, which uses brain images to measure reactions to commercials.
A study from FKF showed that the many Super Bowl commercials with violent imagery generated reactions in regions of the brain associated with anxiety, Mr. Freedman said, including the amygdala, which he characterized as the “threat detector,” and as a result they generated “no connection, engagement or appeal” with viewers.
By comparison, only a few spots fired the brain regions associated with positive emotions, Mr. Freedman said, which he termed unusual in that advertisers typically seek to stimulate responses in those areas.
“They pushed too hard; there was not enough humanity in the ads,” said Mr. Freedman, who is also a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Among the positive commercials, Mr. Freedman listed the “Live the Flavor” commercial for Doritos and a light-hearted spot by Wieden & Kennedy for Coca-Cola Classic, sold by the Coca-Cola Company, which spoofed violent video games.
Of course, not all buzz is good buzz. The commercial for Snickers — created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of Omnicom — drew intense criticism as well as some praise.
In addition to complaining that the Snickers commercial itself was homophobic, organizations like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign, also complained about video clips that went up after the game on the special Web site, which showed the two men committing additional violent acts against themselves and each other. There were also interviews with members of the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts in which they offered disgusted reactions to the accidental kiss.
“As with all of our Snickers advertising, our goal was to capture the attention of our core Snickers consumer, primarily 18-to-24-year-old adult males,” said a spokeswoman for Masterfoods, Alice Nathanson. “Feedback from our target consumers has been positive, and many media and Web site commentators on this year’s Super Bowl lineup ranked the commercial among this year’s best.”
“We know that humor is highly subjective and we understand that some consumers have found the commercial offensive,” Ms. Nathanson said, adding: “Clearly that was not our intent. We do not plan to continue the ad on television or on our Web site.”
It is unusual but not unprecedented for an expensive, high-visibility Super Bowl spot to be withdrawn after a single showing. In 1997, a Super Bowl commercial for Holiday Inn was taken off the air after widespread negative reactions.
The spot, by the agency now called Fallon Worldwide, likened the chainwide renovations of Holiday Inn hotels to the operation that turned “Bob” into the sexiest woman at a class reunion. The complaints were centered on the final shot, which showed a male classmate responding to the new Bob with a horrified grimace.
Thanks to the Web, the Scorekeeping on the Super Bowl Has Just Begun
By STUART ELLIOTT
FOR the teams that play in the Super Bowl, the day after the game is reserved for planning victory parties or promising, “Wait till next year.” For Madison Avenue, the day after has become D-Day, given over to discussing and debating the myriad data that become available about the response to the commercials from the game.
And while the news was good for some Super Bowl advertisers like Anheuser-Busch and Nationwide Financial, it was unusually bad for the Masterfoods division of Mars. Complaints about its Super Bowl commercial for Snickers candy — showing two men committing violence against themselves after they accidentally kiss — led the company to decide late yesterday that it would withdraw the spot.
Masterfoods, which received complaints from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign that the commercial was homophobic, also took down related material on a special Web site (afterthekiss.com).
The Snickers commercial offers a cautionary tale about the echo chamber Super Bowl advertising has become. Years ago, Super Bowl spots pretty much disappeared after the one or two times they were shown during the broadcast. Today, they have afterlives because they are being made available on dozens of Web sites, written about on blogs, forwarded to friends as video clips and even scrutinized for the brain-wave patterns they generate in viewers.
“The opportunity to amplify the value of your commercial beyond game day is invaluable,” said Joshua Stylman, managing partner at Reprise Media, a research company that tracks how advertisers use search-engine marketing on Web sites like Google and Yahoo to complement their TV campaigns.
As of yesterday afternoon, visitors to a special AOL Web site devoted to the Super Bowl spots (aol.com/superbowlads) streamed them more than 15 million times. There have also been more than 1.6 million unique visitors to ifilm.com since Sunday to view the commercials there.
Figures from Akamai Technologies, which is tracking Web site traffic for about two-thirds of the marketers that bought spots during Super Bowl XLI, showed that visitors rose steadily from Sunday through yesterday — meaning that the commercials were the start of the selling process rather than the climax.
Traffic yesterday averaged close to 300,000 visitors a minute, according to Akamai, almost twice the average of 160,000 a minute who came to the Web sites during the game.
“In the old days, you had to put extra sizzle into your commercial to get people to notice it, such as elaborate production values or a celebrity spokesperson,” said Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at Cymfony, a company in Watertown, Mass., that specializes in brand monitoring.
“Now, you have to put all this other stuff around your commercial to make it the kind of spot consumers want to talk about,” Mr. Nail said.
Among those tactics are putting up microsites, dedicated Web sites different from brands’ general sites, like afterthekiss.com, which was separate from Snickers.com; uploading deleted scenes, production clips or other material to video-sharing Web sites like YouTube.com; and offering consumers ring tones, screen savers or MP3 audio files related to the commercials.
The three advertisers whose Super Bowl spots are being talked about the most, according to preliminary data from Cymfony, are Anheuser-Busch, the Doritos brand of snack chips sold by Frito-Lay and Nationwide Financial. All three surrounded and supplemented their Super Bowl commercials with elaborate Web-based campaigns.
All three also pushed the boundaries of Super Bowl advertising by not keeping the contents of their commercials secret before the game, long a traditional tactic to build interest. For example, Nationwide posted its entire spot, featuring the rapper Kevin Federline, on its Web site (nationwide.com), six days before Super Bowl XLI was played.
“The Web is all about diffusion of information, where nothing is a secret,” said Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a unit of the Nielsen Company that measures the buzz, or talk value, of ads. “You could say the Super Bowl has caught up with the Web.”
“The name of the game next year,” Mr. Blackshaw predicted, will be “priming the attention, not making consumers wait for the ‘magic door’ to open.”
As a result, he said, there could be more contests like the Crash the Super Bowl promotion sponsored by Frito-Lay, part of PepsiCo, which asked consumers to create a Doritos spot for the game and asked the public to select a winner from among five finalist spots.
The vote was so close, said a spokesman for Frito-Lay, Jared Dougherty, that just before the game began the company decided to run two spots rather than one. The runner-up’s commercial, called “Check Out Girl,” was added to the lineup along with the winner’s spot, called “Live the Flavor.”
The gamble seemed to have paid off: Not only did the Doritos spots finish high in the Cymfony survey, they came in fifth in the Nielsen BuzzMetrics survey of online conversations about Super Bowl ads, behind Anheuser-Busch, Nationwide, Snickers and FedEx.
Both Doritos spots also finished among the 10 most-viewed moments of the game in households that used TiVo digital video recorders to watch the Super Bowl. “Live the Flavor” — created by Dale Backus and Wes Phillips of Cary, N.C. — was fifth and “Check Out Girl” — created by Kristin Dehnert of Pacific Palisades, Calif. — was eighth.
“My observation is that it’s a high-risk strategy” to ask consumers to create commercials for so high-profile a venue as the Super Bowl, said Todd Jeunger, vice president and general manager for audience research and measurement at TiVo.
“I was a little surprised it could work so well,” he added.
The most-watched moment in the game in TiVo households was a humorous Bud Light commercial about immigrants featuring the comedian Carlos Mencia, by LatinWorks. In second place was a Bud Light commercial by DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, in which a game of rock, paper, scissors turned violent. That spot was among more than a dozen that were centered on cartoon-style violence or slapstick shtick.
“It looked like they pushed to get attention by jolting people,” said Joshua Freedman, a co-founder of FKF Applied Research, which uses brain images to measure reactions to commercials.
A study from FKF showed that the many Super Bowl commercials with violent imagery generated reactions in regions of the brain associated with anxiety, Mr. Freedman said, including the amygdala, which he characterized as the “threat detector,” and as a result they generated “no connection, engagement or appeal” with viewers.
By comparison, only a few spots fired the brain regions associated with positive emotions, Mr. Freedman said, which he termed unusual in that advertisers typically seek to stimulate responses in those areas.
“They pushed too hard; there was not enough humanity in the ads,” said Mr. Freedman, who is also a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Among the positive commercials, Mr. Freedman listed the “Live the Flavor” commercial for Doritos and a light-hearted spot by Wieden & Kennedy for Coca-Cola Classic, sold by the Coca-Cola Company, which spoofed violent video games.
Of course, not all buzz is good buzz. The commercial for Snickers — created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide division of Omnicom — drew intense criticism as well as some praise.
In addition to complaining that the Snickers commercial itself was homophobic, organizations like the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign, also complained about video clips that went up after the game on the special Web site, which showed the two men committing additional violent acts against themselves and each other. There were also interviews with members of the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts in which they offered disgusted reactions to the accidental kiss.
“As with all of our Snickers advertising, our goal was to capture the attention of our core Snickers consumer, primarily 18-to-24-year-old adult males,” said a spokeswoman for Masterfoods, Alice Nathanson. “Feedback from our target consumers has been positive, and many media and Web site commentators on this year’s Super Bowl lineup ranked the commercial among this year’s best.”
“We know that humor is highly subjective and we understand that some consumers have found the commercial offensive,” Ms. Nathanson said, adding: “Clearly that was not our intent. We do not plan to continue the ad on television or on our Web site.”
It is unusual but not unprecedented for an expensive, high-visibility Super Bowl spot to be withdrawn after a single showing. In 1997, a Super Bowl commercial for Holiday Inn was taken off the air after widespread negative reactions.
The spot, by the agency now called Fallon Worldwide, likened the chainwide renovations of Holiday Inn hotels to the operation that turned “Bob” into the sexiest woman at a class reunion. The complaints were centered on the final shot, which showed a male classmate responding to the new Bob with a horrified grimace.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
This was a disaster for Snickers/Mars, Inc. The ad pissed off gays and "disgusted" homophobes at the same time! According to Andy Towle, Mars pulled the ads from the Snickers website as of 6pm today.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
I started a Superbowl thread in Miscellaneous but I guess it makes more sense here. Anyway, yeah I agree with Eric that the disgusted reactions are well...disgusting.
I didn't really pay attention to a lot of the ads. I used the commercial break to catch up with friends (there was a large group of us watching it together in the dorm common area), drink some more alcohol and bitch about how much I hated the Colts, mostly because of the overexposed Peyton Manning. Once the Patriots were out of the Superbowl, I didn't really care who won but I guess I found myself just actively rooting for a Colts loss.
I didn't really pay attention to a lot of the ads. I used the commercial break to catch up with friends (there was a large group of us watching it together in the dorm common area), drink some more alcohol and bitch about how much I hated the Colts, mostly because of the overexposed Peyton Manning. Once the Patriots were out of the Superbowl, I didn't really care who won but I guess I found myself just actively rooting for a Colts loss.
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Eric
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- Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota
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Penelope wrote:The Snickers ad, aside from being amazingly unfunny, is also being tagged as homophobic and endorsing gay-bashing.
Americablog.
Towleroad.
AfterElton.
Whatever. To be offended by these ads is to be incredibly thin-skinned. That said, the video of the disgusted reactions from jocks on the Web site is troubling.
In any case, the only one of the four alternate endings that didn't rate a negative sign over at Commercial Closet was, ironically enough, the one I thought the most potentially risible.
The Snickers ad, aside from being amazingly unfunny, is also being tagged as homophobic and endorsing gay-bashing.
Americablog.
Towleroad.
AfterElton.
Americablog.
Towleroad.
AfterElton.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
-
MovieWes
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- Location: San Antonio, Texas, USA
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Well, the Superbowl is the only time during the year that the commercials actually show true creativity. The companies who run their ads during the Superbowl can't afford to run their usual junk because air time costs them around $12 million in all (although, there were only about 20 or so ads out of around 100 that I actually thought were funny).
"Young men make wars and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution." -- Alec Guinness (Lawrence of Arabia)
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Mister Tee
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FilmFan720
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- Location: Illinois
My favorites:
Blockbuster, Click the Mouse
Budweiser, Immigrant Class
Budweiser, Wedding Reception
Coca Cola, Happiness Factory
Doritos, Live the Flavor
Emerald Nuts, Boogie Man
FedEx, Moon Office
Garmin, MapMan
GM, Obsessed with Quality
Snickers, Kiss
Edited By FilmFan720 on 1170695692
Blockbuster, Click the Mouse
Budweiser, Immigrant Class
Budweiser, Wedding Reception
Coca Cola, Happiness Factory
Doritos, Live the Flavor
Emerald Nuts, Boogie Man
FedEx, Moon Office
Garmin, MapMan
GM, Obsessed with Quality
Snickers, Kiss
Edited By FilmFan720 on 1170695692
"Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good."
- Minor Myers, Jr.
- Minor Myers, Jr.
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MovieWes
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Anyone watch the Superbowl last night?
Overall I found the commercials to be weak this year, but there were a few that I really liked. Anyway, for those of you who didn't watch, here are my favorite ads (and for those of you who did, enjoy them all over again)...
1. Nationwide: Kevin Federline (Rollin' V.I.P.)
2. Bud Lite: But He Has an Axe
3. Bud Lite: Fist Bump
4. Bud Lite: Rock, Paper, Scissors
5. Snickers: The Accidental Kiss
6. GM: Obsessed With Quality
7. Budweiser: The Dalmatian
8. Career Builder: Jungle Office (Darts)
9. Doritos: Live the Flavor
10. Bud Lite: Wedding Reception
11. Bud Lite: Class Mencia
12. Budweiser: King Crab
13. Emerald Nuts: Robert Goulet (Boogeyman)
14. Bud Lite: Great Apes
15. FedEx: Not What it Seems
And to watch the complete Superbowl commercial line-up, click here.
Overall I found the commercials to be weak this year, but there were a few that I really liked. Anyway, for those of you who didn't watch, here are my favorite ads (and for those of you who did, enjoy them all over again)...
1. Nationwide: Kevin Federline (Rollin' V.I.P.)
2. Bud Lite: But He Has an Axe
3. Bud Lite: Fist Bump
4. Bud Lite: Rock, Paper, Scissors
5. Snickers: The Accidental Kiss
6. GM: Obsessed With Quality
7. Budweiser: The Dalmatian
8. Career Builder: Jungle Office (Darts)
9. Doritos: Live the Flavor
10. Bud Lite: Wedding Reception
11. Bud Lite: Class Mencia
12. Budweiser: King Crab
13. Emerald Nuts: Robert Goulet (Boogeyman)
14. Bud Lite: Great Apes
15. FedEx: Not What it Seems
And to watch the complete Superbowl commercial line-up, click here.
"Young men make wars and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution." -- Alec Guinness (Lawrence of Arabia)