Super Bowl Ads: What Will They Do To Grab Your Attention?

The Super Bowl is arguably the most watch television program of the year, and for some people, isn’t all about the sport. Two of the best American Football teams compete in a once in a lifetime championship game, where the winner will be handed the coveted Lombardi trophy. Amidst all of the lights, glory, highlights and injuries, are carefully constructed advertisements that use funny, weird, attention-grabbing antics in order to not only generate views, but to also generate customers. Considering the fact that these advertisements take a serious chunk of money to put on during the Super Bowl, anywhere up to 5 million dollars per 30-second slot, the companies try to pull out all of the stops for these small windows of time.

Every year it seems that there are some companies that advertise themselves very well, as they should when they dump that much money into securing a slot of television time between the action. The two ads that will be discussed are from 2014’s Super Bowl. Both of which are very good contenders for being a successful advertisement campaign.

The first advertisement is Chobani’s “Ransacked” advertisement. In this advertisement, the scene takes place in what seems like a small town. Everyone is going about his or her day, and then we enter the small general store. With shrieks from all around, it seems that a bear has entered the store and is causing mayhem. But why would a bear be in the store? Well, it turns out the bear was just looking for Chobani’s honey flavored Greek yogurt due to its ‘real, natural ingredients’. The bear leaves, and the local cop show up just afterwards to add some comic relief to the situation. This does follow the narrative storytelling structure, as there is an exposition (normal day in small town America), a rising action (bear enters store), a climax (bear finds what he is looking for), and falling action/resolution (bear leaves store).

The second advertisement is Radioshack’s “The Phone Call Commercial”. This advertisement first shows two RadioShack employee, one of which is on the store phone, thus giving us an exposition. The phone call ends, where the other employee asks what the phone call was about, the employee who got off the phone seconds prior says, “The 80’s called, and they want their store back”. This scene changed with a bunch of 80’s pop culture references come into the RadioShack, and begins taking all of the ‘outdated’ technology in the store, which is the rising action. The pop references include Alf, Hulk Hogan, Twisted Sister, Chucky, and Erik Estrada from Chips. The store is completely emptied in their wake, which could be considered the climax. The falling action/resolution is that RadioShack gets a complete remodel and enters into a new generation of technology retail.

Now while both of these advertisements can be considered attention grabbing, one of them had a bigger impact than the other. RadioShack’s commercial works better due to the amount of nostalgia that could have been perceived by the audience. Due to the target audience of the Super Bowl, this advertisement had a ‘trip down memory lane’ feel to it. People remember RadioShack, but when a bunch of popular culture references come onto the screen, the audience is instantly teleported back to the time period to when all of that was relevant. RadioShack used to be a huge company for technology retail, but since then has been a late adopter to the new age technology scene. This advertisement not only shows that the store is still relevant, but also shows that it has finally caught up with its new design and welcomes the new technology generation with open arms.