SUPERBOWL ADVERTS 2015

It's that time of year again - Superbowl. And that means only one thing. Superbowl adverts!

Around the world, an estimated one billion people watched last year's Super Bowl. 

Research suggests that up to half of viewers in the USA tune-in specifically for the adverts, which are the most expensive in global television.

A 30 second slot during the event sells for around $4.5 million (£3.0 million).

The average price of Super Bowl ads have risen more than 50 per cent in the last 10 years, defying economic downturns.

The game could easily generate over a quarter of a billion dollars in ad sales.
The importance of the event as a media product is shown by the way American TV stations devote whole programmes and large features on regular news programmes to examining and analyzing the adverts as if they are works of art to be reviewed. Certainly, given the scope of the audience and the fact that 60% say they watch whilst using social media to post/discuss the adverts shows that the trends these adverts represent are indicative of the state of the [USA] advertising market.

Experts call it fragmentation. TV shows no longer attract big audience that once made mass marketing possible, so advertisers lost faith in making big budget emotional spectaculars to move the general public. 

How often do you watch media products with your parents or wider family?
What kinds of programmes?
Why/why not?

Critics called Breaking Bad the greatest show of all time, but fewer than 3% of Americans actually watched it. The Super Bowl is the exception.  

More than a hundred million Americans come together to watch the game. And a hundred million viewers glued to their TVs for four hours is a big deal for advertisers.
The airtime alone costs $4.5 million for 30 seconds. Many advertisers budget a further $4-6m to preview their spots on YouTube and promote them on Twitter. They have staffed social media command centers with sitcom writers to talk their way into the online conversation and spin it the way of the advertisers and their client.  Add the cost of shooting special effects and hiring the star name or director [usually in the region of $1 million] and the fifty advertisers who appear in the Super Bowl have staked half a billion dollars on a night’s popularity.
Some struck early. The 2014 game was the first Super Bowl where the ads were already in the public domain weeks in advance of the event and in that year Budweiser racked up close to 20m YouTube views of their Super Bowl spots before game time.



We might consider how this impacts on our understanding of the AQA MEST3 examination, specifically Section B and the Impact of Technology task.

[1] When did Superbowl move from being a programme about the sports to one in which over 50% of the audience admitted that they watched it as much for the adverts as the football? The fact that the audience can utilise social media to discuss in real time the adverts suggests that the impact of social media platforms is a key issue. We might usefully employ Blumler and Katz here - social identity - as a reason underlying audiences use of this media product.

[2] The preview of adverts phenomenon across TV stations and internet indicates that broadcasters themselves now comprehend the value of the advert as social media product. There is as much written about the adverts in the run up to Superbowl as to the game. the fact that the companies themselves use You tube to preview their products for Superbowl indicates their understanding that audiences now actively seek out adverts - a marketing dream!

[3] The spend on adverts [$4.5 million for 30 seconds, $1 million for production of the advert; some $4 million for You Tube and web promotion] suggests that these slots are seen as being special in their appeal in a way that no other adverts usually are. That the adverts are designed to evoke a social media response [ Controversial - the Go-Daddy and Carl Jr adverts from past finals; Emotional appeal - Clint Eastwood Halftime for America from 2014]; Humorous - the Geico adverts; Family Values - the Dove Mencare adverts; McDonalds advert 2015; Warmth - Budweiser puppy adverts] is good example of Blumler and Katz as well as Hall's Encoding/Decoding response or the Perception theory of Morley etc.

[4] That the adverts are designed to create and set agendas for the product - McComb's agenda setting theory - such as the BMW clean fuel advert or the McDonalds 2015 advert.

[5] The employment of social media intervention strategists working live in real time to steer conversations on line suggests the power of 2-Step Flow as well as agenda setting and directing. That social media is a form of audience approval [or not] highlights the impact of new technology on advertising campaigns and audience interpretations of their messages.

Maybe the Samsung advert from 2013 gives an insight into the whole process.

SUPERBOWL 2015 ADVERTS AND CAMPAIGNS

Below are some examples from 2015 and some that explore continuing issues.

BUD LIGHT:

DORITOS

Doritos ran a lengthy 'home-made' advert contest with the winner to appear in the final. A neat way of avoiding the production cost whilst generating massive audience interest. A good example of products that ride a wave of Superbowl interest for many months ahead of the event. Last year the use of audience to vote for which Beckham advert was shown ['naked' or 'clothed'] took on similar approach. Again, we might apply our theory to the campaign and also to impact of social media - the control debate.

DOVE MENCARE 

 

MCDONALDS 

 

TRYING TO IMPROVE BRAND IMAGE
Some companies had a lot to prove — and it showed in their ads.
McDonald's returned to the Super Bowl with an ad for its latest promotion, which will let randomly selected customers pay for their orders with acts of love, like a high-five, fist bump or a call to a relative. The promotion starts Monday and runs through Feb. 14
The McDonald's ad was an extension of the company's recently launched campaign seeking to associate its brand with the positive emotion of loving as it fights to hold onto customers amid intensifying competition.
According to the contest rules posted online, McDonald's says each participating restaurant will select 100 winners over the course of the contest.
Meanwhile, Carnival Cruise Lines' ad included a voiceover by John F. Kennedy speaking about the sea. The world's largest cruise company was trying to boost the image of cruises with its first ever Super Bowl ad after several years of bad publicity from illnesses on ships and the Costa Concordia wreck in 2012.
And Coca-Cola's ad called for positivity in the face of online negativity.
The company's "Make It Happy" ad was an update on its long-running strategy of getting people to associate its soft drinks with happiness at a time when people increasingly see them as unhealthy

 

SKITTLES AND SNICKERS

In the battle of candy-coated sugar pebbles, Skittles pulls ahead of M&Ms for at least one night. The fruit chews will feature their first-ever Super Bowl ad this year while Mars chose to push Snickers instead of the chocolate candies. Here are teasers for each of the coming ads. Danny Trejo as a member of "The Brady Bunch" is priceless. And former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner stars in the Skittles spot.

VICTORIA SECRET

GEICO

 

MERCEDES-BENZ

'BANNED' SUPERBOWL ADVERT

There's always one - last year Soda Stream were forced to withdraw or re-edit a spot that featured Samantha Morton pitying Coke and Pepsi because soda stream was going to destroy their market [Pepsi and Coke are major sponsors of Superbowl and the TV channel that shows it]. Smantha Morton was also forced to resign a United Nations role she held because of her links to Soda Stream who had built a factory on disputed land in the Gaza Strip.

This year it was Go-Daddy. Not because of a continuation of what many had seen as previous Superbowl sexually offensive adverts but because they used a puppy! A preview showing of the advert on a major TV channel lead to such a hostile social media campaign that they withdrew the advert.

 

 

Not all advertisers play safe. the Nationwide insurance company opted for quite a controversial offering

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COURSEWORK/MEST 4 REVISION IDEAS

You ought by now to be some way towards some final ideas surrounding coursework, something we'll discuss in the lesson

I've added new material on the exam prep tab regarding exemplar A grade responses approved by AQA for MEST3

LESSON 30: TRUE DETECTIVE

This session we need to extend the way that we consider how best to analyse a moving image text. We need to move our thinking from statement of the blindingly obvious into deeper thinking about the institutional nature of the product, establishment of brands, audience perceptions etc.

True Detective was created by HBO [Home Box Office] the American cable TV company. It was aired in the USA on HBO and then sold around the world to other TV stations [Sky Atlantic in the UK].

 The most successful programmes have been Sex and the City, The Sopranos, The Wire, Entourage, Six Feet Under, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones and True Blood

Aimed at an adult audience the programme deals with the investigation over a period of 20 years into a gruesome series of murders and delves into issues surrounding the abuse of children, strange quasi-religious groups and cults and corruption. the series was a huge commercial success being syndicated around the world and also won great critical acclaim. It featured two significant Hollywood names in using Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConnaughy as the principal leads.

[A] Watch the trailer. Apply the model approach to ascertain the general response we might make to the product.

MODEL:
·         WHAT TYPE OF PRODUCT IS IT?
·         WHO IS THIS AIMED AT?
·         WHAT WOULD THEIR EXPECTATIONS BE OF SUCH A PRODUCT?
·         HOW DOES THIS PRODUCT TRY TO MEET THESE?
·         HOW SUCCESSFUL IS IT IN DOING SO?

[B] How does the credits reflect the trailer?

[C] Watch the credits for Luther and then apply the model to this product.

Luther was a successful BBC TV series broadcast in 2010 to 2013. The series were short runs of 6, 4, 4 episodes with talk of a mini-series for 2015. The series was a huge critical success and also a large income earner for BBC as it was syndicated around the world, adding prestige to the BBC brand.

Task [1]
How does each product reflect the needs of contemporary audiences for realism?


Task [2]
Crime and detective programmes have always held popularity with TV audiences, never more so than today. Account for the popularity of crime and detective programmes on our TVs


Task [3] 
The growth in popularity of thrillers and programmes about violent and brutal crime are seen by some as contributing towards an increasingly violent society. Do you agree that such products encourage violence or might be contributing to a moral panic in society?

EXAM PRACTISE:

TASK:

What do we understand to be the intention of this product [evidence]?

Who is the target audience?

What techniques is the poster employing to get it's message across?

Is it effective - what criteria would you apply to determine this?

Can we apply similar ideas to this campaign product?
How do both of these apply commercial ideas [selling products] to selling an ideology?
How can such techniques be effective?

Today we explored the images and discussed a number of issues:

[1] What is the intention of each product [to inform; make aware; to volunteer; to alter actions]
[2] Who the audience was and how this shaped the product
[3] That shock tactics was a useful response but that it was limiting to our thinking if that is all we can see. We considered the use of branding [a flag to gather under; to reinforce our ideas and our identity]. Verisimilitude - the actuality of the classroom, the street to normalize the issue. The use of stereotypes - the children; the woman. 
[4] The use of humour / irony - the Kinder egg; the pointlessness of the thumbs up.
[5] The impact of the products on the audience

LESSON 25: PAGE3

So, it's official - sort of.  The end of an era and of what has become both a cultural icon and also a hot polarizing topic in the media debate around representations, stereotyping and the influence of media products on audiences.

the Guardian: Jan20 2015 The Sun page-3-models

Not only does this touch on all of the above issues but it now seems to be an interesting item in the discussion of branding, brand identity and the ideology of  both media institutions such as the Sun and the way that other non-media companies such as Disney perceive how their relationship with them impacts on their own corporate brand identity and their sales.

 More than this, we can extend this into the debate about media control and the notions of the growing power of social media.

There has been opposition to Page 3 since its inception. The fact that the tag itself - Page 3 - has come to represent an ideology of men's [society's?] attitude towards women says much about the power of a media icon / convention. Page 3 has not only entered the national vernacular but has come to represent the public's  idea of the ideology of the Sun reader more than the rest of the paper, even more so than it's infamous jingoistic headlines during the Falklands War sinking of the Belgrano [Gotcha!] or the anti-European campaigns ['Up Yours, Delores'].

The Guardian page-3-feminist-the-sun-gender-roles

The comment that : 

“Page 3 piggybacked the sexual revolution, persuading women that they were sexual pioneers when they were actually reprising ancient gender roles.... The message of Page 3 was never “strong” and “assertive”. It was “available” and “passive”

seems to sum up the whole issue regarding the page 3 as a battleground for competing ideologies surrounding women and their role in what was a male dominated society.

Of current interest is why now? What provoked this move? Was it, as the first article suggests, a commercial decision , a financial calculation that the icon of page 3 had outlived any commercial [sales] value? The balance being that any loss in sales would be compensated for by acquiring new readers who had previously found the paper objectionable and attracting new commercial advertisers who could now justify placing adverts to their customers in what remains the UK's biggest circulating newspaper.

the-demise-of-lads-mags-and-the-rise-of-feminism

Perhaps the 'why now' question is answered by looking at two issues. [1]  the Irish edition dropped Page 3 in 2014 with no significant impact on sales and [2] the Sun sees its future as digital with more than 4 million readers aged 15-34 across print and digital and 40% of its readers being female. Murdoch [the owner] suggested in 2014 that the Page 3 was old-fashioned and maybe no longer relevant to the digital age.

And there we may have it. the digital age has brought with it many advances, one of which being social media such as Facebook and Twitter. One thing that such platforms offer is the opportunity for fragmented groups or individuals to gather together and to create powerful campaigns aimed at such institutions as The Sun and Page 3. It is little coincidence that the video we looked at earlier in the term [The Experiment] and the decision of Tesco to change all of its news displays to hide sexual images from younger children come just weeks before this announcement. Social media pressure groups have a power to influence large institutions. The Turn Your Back on Page 3 campaign and No More Page 3 and others have proven this. The latter attracted 217,000 signatures to an online petition and The Experiment film has had over 100,000 viewings. clearly, social media, a digital platform has provided a means of effectively getting a single message out to a wide audience - consider how long it might previously have taken to get a traditional written petition together and to have attracted such numbers.

LESSON 24: THE DARK WEB

A great piece of documentary film-making on a very delicate but very contemporary issue. Watch this over the next week or so and be prepared to talk in class [after mock week] about the ideas contained in it.

The lesson when study leave is completed will focus on discussing this text and the issues it covers. We need your view points and will be asking you to write something on this afterwards.

LESSON 23: THE MEDIA EXAMINATION

So, we're at the start of the next phase of your journey - the final full term of study.
We're starting with the mock examinations next week so it's probably a good time to review some of the issues that the AQA paper will be looking at

SECTION A:
This section follows a format of a comparison of the ideas / content / concerns of two media products. Q1 always asks for a response that involves a direct comparison as to how each text deals with the issue or what they tell us about the manner in which an aspect of media from is used - narrative; genre; language; representation; values etc. Q2 is a wider contexts question where the products are used a starting point for discussion on an issue. Q3 is the media debates where the products are linked into an issue such as dumbing down, censorship, media violence etc.

SECTION B:
This year it's IDENTITIES or a response to NEW TECHNOLOGY.
The identities task will require you to use the case-study to consider how a group are represented or mis-represented in media products. Such tasks could be around alternative representations, the use of stereotypes, the distorting effect of media presentations on audiences. You will need to think about the ideas we looked at in the exemplar case-study on masculinity and the media last term.
New technology is a favourite task. The tasks boil down very simply : how do media technologies impact on how audiences access media products and how technologies impact on the way in which media industry produces and markets its products. These are pretty much the same task.
We need to consider that any assessment of impact requires an understanding of what went before as well as what happened after. For us, ground zero for the impact point can be one of three key dates / events:
1990 [Sky TV/ Amazon] 
2000 [digital music / I-Tunes] 
2004 [Web 2.0 / Facebook]
For each we need to consider their impact on the relevant media industry [broadcasting; music; retailing; communication/social media] and the products that developed from these [netflix; spotify; twitter] and the wider technologies they changed [mobile phones; tablets; consoles].
Just the most casual of consideration will show the vast range of examples and ideas that can be incorporated into any essay on this topic. We could explore the impact of Ebay [1995] or Google [1998] or of Wikipedia [2001] or of the I-Phone [2007] or the I-Pad [2010].

The following films are the full 4 episodes of the BBC programme The Virtual Revolution.  This series first broadcast in 2010 is possibly the best overview of the topic area of the impact of digital technology of the web. Each episode takes a theme and explores it by interview and examples. Great as the series is we need to be aware that at 5 years old some of it is dated - almost inevitably given its subject matter. [e.g. in episode 1 Wikipedia is mentioned as having 60 million hits a month; September 2014 it had 500 million unique visitors per month - almost a ten fold increase in five years. In Episode 4 we are told that Facebook has 350 million accounts; in 2014 that figure was 1.3 billion - a four fold increase in five years].

episode 1

episode 2

episode 3

 

 

episode 4