Just Another…Tide AD
Super Bowl is the Championship game of the National Footbal League (NFL) in the United States. During this game the U.S television broadcast features many high-profile television commercials, colloquially known as Super Bowl ads. The phenomenon is a result of the game’s extremely high viewership and wide demographics: Super Bowl games have frequently been among the United States’most watched television broadcast. As such, advertisers have typically used commercials during the Super Bowl as a means of building awareness for their products and services among this wide audience, while also trying to generate buzz around the ads themselves so they may receive additional exposure, such as becoming a viral video. Many companies invest huge amount of money on their ads that are going to be featured in the super bowl making the challenge even bigger. Super Bowl advertisements have become iconic and well-known because of their cinematographic quality, unpredictability, surreal humor, and use of special effects.
One of those successful ads is the tide ad aired on 2018 during the Super bowl. But what is so special about this ad you may wonder. Tide’s wildly ambitious plan is much more involved than your average Super Bowl spot. The detergent brand’s goal was to take over the Super Bowl with a campaign that positions Harbour as an omniscient narrator of sorts, asking Super Bowl viewers to question every ad they see — because if you’re seeing clean clothes, you could be watching a Tide ad.
To accomplish this, the company bought an ad in every quarter — a 45-second establishing spot in the first quarter, along with 15-second ads for each of the following three quarters. Tide then filmed each scene as a separate short spot in the genre of whatever product it’s pretending to pitch. There’s a car ad, a beer ad, a deodorant ad and a half-dozen others, all of which, through various twists, turn out to be pitching the same laundry detergent.
Detergent is something so omnipresent that it tends to be unnoticed, so the challenge for the brand and for their advertising experts was to stand out in a world of fancier and more appealing products as those shown during the superbowl breaks. Another challenge was probably to make ads universal enough for people even abroad (not in the US) to get the point (-> very classic ads like for Coca Cola or Mister Clean or Gillette) but the globalized world we live in, and the basicness of the fake spots make them all relatable in a way.
There is also a different approach on why this ad is so smart and therefore successful.Tide didn’t just pick random advertisments to mix them so they can make their own. They picked the most successful ones that surely a huge number of people have watched. What makes this choice so smart? The hint that their successful ads is a result of TIDE. In every successful ad the actors are wearing clean clothes as a result of the tide detergent. Can you imagine the same ads but with the difference that the actors are wearing dirty clothes?the result would surely not be the same!
Alexandris Ilias
Team members: dimitris boutsikow Loukia Tsiota Nick Noulas Manon Fossemale
Course instructor: Betty Tsakarestou
