The Budweiser puppy is finally home and Doritos showed how with a little ingenuity, pigs really can fly. The viewers of Super Bowl XLIX have crowned their favorite ads and picked their winners and losers. But for many advertisers, this is more than a popularity contest. It’s also their chance to make a unique statement to a targeted audience and asking them to make a specific decision.
Perhaps the two most creatively strategic ads where ironically from car brands. Both Fiat and Mercedes Benz used their 60 second TV time-outs to launch new products and showcase them directly to men at opposite ends of the economic ladder.
For Fiat, that new product is a sexier, pumped-up, all-wheel drive version of its sub-compact 500, called the 500X. And, it found a rather creative way to take something small and grow it into something… big.
Mercedes Benz took a different but equally strategic approach by segmenting upper income men with a message about speed and breaking away from pack of bulky luxury cars.
These ads did more than entertain. Both used well recognized story lines to serve as a metaphor to make a highly strategic statement to potential buyers. (Figure 1) Fiat’s target audience is young urban men who have not yet climbed the economic ladder but want to look smart, hip and slightly sophisticated in their purchases. With a starting price of $20,000 the Fiat 500X ideally fits into their budget with Fiat making the value proposition that this is the pumped-up sexy car to showcase their lifestyle.
Figure 1
Mercedes Benz makes a similar argument, but clearly aimed at highly affluent men who want to live life in the “faster lane.” Priced at $130,000 this is a car that has a very narrow market segmentation within the luxury car category but makes but makes the appeal that the owner will drive a new race—and be seen differently among his peers.
Figure 2
The goal of any advertisement is to drive interest and ultimately sales. As product introduction ads, initial research suggest they were high successful at placing viewers into the top of the marketing funnel. Data from Google Trends suggest an exponential increase in web searches on both cars immediately after the Super Bowl. (Figure 2)
It helps that both ads have also been viral hits on YouTube gathering millions of more views. Let’s face it, they’re fun. And when advertising can be fun and strategic their power only increases.
Stand by... 