What is G? commercial

As many of my readers know I am a sports fan. I am also a decent athlete. I played numerous sports in high school and played intramural sports in college and to this day. I watch just about anything on t.v. that is sports related.

I say this because hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars are spent on advertising during sporting events throughout the year. Between sponsoring events, taking corporate sponsorships of sports stadiums, the seemingly endless repetition of television commercials, and banner and pop up ads on sports news sites, it's really hard to not notice this marketing effort.

Let's focus on television commercials today. As with any competitive market, marketing ads must distinguish themselves in order to be effective. With commercials the typical options are comedy, cuteness, wierdness, occasionally the 'Oh my god, I have to go out and by that right now' commercial or 'cool factor', or finally the so insanely annoying you can't get the commercial out of your head approach. All of these options, along with others not mentioned, can be effective when done right. Of course this all depends on the viewers point of view.

However, sometimes you really have to question why a certain commercial was deemed to be 'the one', or rather the final cut. For many people, the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld commercials left you scratching your head. But at least you could kinda figure out that they had something to do with Microsoft. Budweiser does a great job of making fun and/or funny commercials that are easily recognizable during the Superbowl. GoDaddy.com, a website domain name hoster/provider, had very effective Superbowl commercials two years ago in that there were lots of scantily clad women running around and the commercials were fun. The problem was, while there was a web address at the end of the commercial, when you went to this address you could not find the commercials but instead found the boring domain name website. The CareerBuilder Superbowl commercials from last year's Superbowl were very strange but were also attention drawing... you really wanted to know what this commercial was about and in the end you were easily able to figure it out.

Sometimes you see great commercials that do everything but tell you what you really want to know, "What/who is this about?" Such an example is in the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4dm-OnmLXY&feature=channel_page

This commercial does a lot of very good things. While watching you are drawn in by the popular figures; it's got good background music that sometimes gives you goosebumps; it's a very tame commercial and not really annoying, even after watching it several times in a short amount of time. The one BIG thing it doesn't have is, what is this commercial really about?

Is it a sports commercial? Is it another randomwebservice.com ad? Is it an ad for some new clothing line? Anti-drug commercial? Ok you get the picture. On one hand, this commercial has drawn lots of attention from personal blogs such as mine; on the other hand, there is no direct links to this actual company's website found in Google/Yahoo/etc when you search on "What is G" or "G commercial" (at least not as of Tuesday 1/5/09). Fortunately for this company the internet has evolved to the point where any random person can find an answer to just about anything. Somehow this has been termed 'viral marketing'. I liken it to crapshooting.

I'd wager that if you put numbers against numbers, traffic and more importantly sales are much higher when there is a clear message of who/what the commercial is about and when you have directed listing in Google/Yahoo for visitors to click on and visit your website. I get viral marketing when it's cheap... but when you spend millions on a commercial and hope for a viral marketing reward... something's wrong with your marketing department.

In case you are wondering this commercial is for Gatorade, who has decided that they needed a complete re-brand of their entire product line. I'll save my thoughts on this for my next blog.