Super Bowl Ads: Integration Fail
If I were the only Monday morning quarterback critiquing last night’s Super Bowl ads you might expect to see a list of my 5 favorites, 5 duds, and plenty of self-promoting discourse about product positioning, creative excellence, and blah, blah, blah. But I’m not the first, thousands of bloggers beat me to it.
Instead let’s chat about last night’s digital integration fails, citing my favorite spot of the night (ok I had to) as a perfect example of how marketers are just barely missing the mark. Watch the ad…
Very cool. And the curves on that thing, whoa, looks like Ms. Ladybug went through a gender transformation. Last night this made me thirst for more information about the 2011 Beetle - (this is also known as an ad doing its job). So, like most Americans, when I’m thirsty for more information I hop on Google to get the story. But apparently VW doesn’t think like me. Below is a screen grab of the results returned as I searched for “2011 Beetle”.
Concept car images, automobilemag, examiner, and motortrend…really? Hey V-dub, your $3 million spot did its job…I actually cared about a Beetle last night. So why didn’t you buy ‘2011’, ‘Beetle’, ‘VW’ and sponsor the results for the time frame during the Super Bowl so I could get some more info? I mean, why not drive me to an incredible purpose-built microsite with sneak-peek photos, behind the scenes design work and a history of the slug-bug to supplement this great ad? Integration fail.
Takeaways:
- Understand and predict behavior; if this marketing effort goes exactly to plan, then what?
- Timeliness is key; for one moment in time I was excited about the 2011 Beetle, it may never happen again.
- Mass media and digital content are both the chicken and the egg; there are no rules for which comes first.
To VW’s credit, the Youtube page is very cool and they now (at 2:00pm Monday) are sponsoring results on Google (albeit to a youtube channel with no additional information).
