Prof mentioned that these blog posts don’t necessarily have to be about the HW, more so related to class discussion. I will still be adding some commentary on the reading but I think I have more free range now that he’s mentioned it.
A few things came to mind after class…
- I need to pull together a central content location (eg. ahem, a website) very soon.
- The Super Bowl is really soon, which is connected to this post.
- I need a “brand identity.” If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to message me. I have some stuff in development, but am open to suggestions and open to meting half way.
The Super Bowl of Marketing is the Super Bowl
Week 2 was good. Prof made mention of things I like such as sneakers, Mad Men, and of course, the Super Bowl.
The Super Bowl is probably the most layered reflection of American culture. It’s the championship game for the country’s most popular sport and captures the attention of over 100 million people. Thus, it has also become the crown jewel of marketing. The Super Bowl is so popular in this country, you can use it as an excuse for virtually every class presentation.
Ok, that last statement wasn’t meant to be taken literally. The only circumstance you would make your class presentation about the Super Bowl would be if your professor made it part of the project. In any event, the Super Bowl is a huge deal in the world of marketing, so much that some people tune in just to watch the advertisements. And let’s not kid ourselves — the Super Bowl has popularized quite a few ads…
You’ve never seen an aging millennial shed more buzzworthy tears until you’ve seen him/her watch these YouTube videos.
In the current climate, there are content strategies that parties unrelated to football now use to milk off the chatter, engagement and conversation. The digital space has now made it easier to not only engage if you don’t have an ad, but engage before the game even kicks off. Heck, you can even begin posting content weeks in advanced depending on how creative you are.
Allow me to craft an example. Let’s take something unrelated to football, say, I don’t know, Scotch tape. How do you connect a product like this to the Super Bowl outside of buying an expensive ad and putting a football player in it? Let’s use our imagination…
- Scotch tape is a home and office necessity
- It usually comes in a small size, thus it’s easy to pass around
- Football involves great hand-and-eye coordination, a sense of leadership and heroism, and, oh yeah, an aerodynamic ball which you pass around
- At this point a digital ad person driving the creative would say let’s go with a sponsored ad campaign on: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If the campaign has a specific name, maybe buy some Google adword buys will be effective. Let’s call this campaign “Game Tape.” Game tape is the footage which coaches and players review after a game ends in which they pick apart the strengths and weaknesses of their performance.
- We need these contents though. We also need to think about a Scotch tape use scenario. Maybe a teacher has Brand X in her classroom and all of the sudden the school supply manager swings by and launches a Scotch tape for him/her to use. The teacher quickly tapes up more fine pieces of art on the classroom wall. Touch down.
- ^The above scenario is captured as a video. However, there’s no plans to make it a traditional campaign.
- The digital ad person then releases the video during the last round of the play-offs and plans to run it from then until the middle of March — maybe even longer if Scotch likes it.
- From late January until Spring Break, anyone that’s searched for office supplies, Scotch tape, football, Super Bowl, or NFL will be submitted to this ad at some point. Let’s not end it at just social media channels; the ad folks released the video on YouTube and runs as a pre-roll on certain videos and it appears on Hulu for children’s programming.
There you have it. Something more or less unrelated to football that now has a shelf-life because of your lack of cache clearance.
Content is King; Context is Queen
In the situation I described above, the content is ultimately what reaches people. The context however certainly helps. As a matter of fact about 10% of what I described above had anything to do with the content. It was probably 90% scenario, which of course provides context. One will essentially drive the other, though in an era where metrics are so valuable, you can be sure that the creative direction people take will be backed by some analysis.
It should be interesting to note I didn’t mention anything about blogging as it pertains to that ad. Maybe Scotch tape’s corporate blog will happily announce it should it become a reality but allow me to elaborate: a blog will not dictate the success of this ad campaign. There are things you could probably do to make it more successful (eg. send free Scotch tape to mommy bloggers or teacher bloggers), but the source content here is the video ad. It should be noted that one could make a YouTube channel or an Instagram into their main content source thus reducing the need for a blog. As we go deeper into the Internet of things, I suspect blogging will take on even more forms.
