What Will the Marketing Gods Unleash on Us this Sunday?

This coming Sunday marks the annual festival of television advertising. It’s that one big Sunday every year where CMOs pull out the checkbook and in a single stroke spend somewhere between $3.5 million and $4 million for 30 seconds of airtime. That doesn’t include the estimated hundreds of thousands per spot in PR dollars to promote the ads to the general public, employees, Wall Street, and just about anyone who will listen, watch, read, like, post, or tweet about the effort.

As in previous years, part of the television advertising festival will include a football game played between the commercials.

With each passing year, the Super Bowl has become less of a sporting event and more of a marketing bowl—not that there’s anything wrong with that, because if we want to know who’s responsible for the current state of the situation all we have to do is look in the mirror. So, the game itself is almost secondary to the stories swirling around about what the official sponsors and advertisers will be doing to come up with a new way to reach viewers and engage them in some way on behalf of their respective brands.

How is Volkswagen going to top that cute Darth Vader spot?

While I haven’t done any quantitative analysis, I would bet that there’s more media space and time devoted to the commercials and marketing antics of the sponsors than to the game itself.

Some advertisers begin weeks in advance teasing the public about what they’ll be doing. Some offer previews of their television spots, some invite the public to create the spots, and all, of course, invite participation before, during, and after the game via social media.

This Sunday should be the showcase of marketing innovation, or at least one of the P’s of marketing. Here’s hoping we see something worth writing about next week. And maybe the game will be pretty good too.

Don’t Even Chirp

Tweeting, chirping, crowing, and other bird calls, to which we’ve all grown accustomed through the power of technology at our fingertips and smartphones, can be valuable—but like anything good or bad for you, they should be used with some forethought and moderation.

I had a client doing business in the consumer electronics world who couldn’t wait to get to the huge Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and let all his clients know what was going on. Despite our best efforts to coach him on only saying something when there was something of value to say, we were regaled with such tweets as, “CES, Vegas, baby.” Then there was the kid in the candy store: “CES, this is awesome!!” And what followed after those was pretty much the same, along with one or two that must have been sent right after a long cocktail hour.

The message being, unless you have something of value to say, you’re better off not saying anything less your tweets be viewed by others as annoying squawks. Just because you’re on Twitter and have some followers doesn’t mean you have to blast something out every hour or even every day. Letting everybody know little Becky just threw up may be better sent to your family group on Facebook.

Getting back to my former client in Vegas, baby. What you choose to tweet, chirp, crow, and squawk about all says something about your creativity—so let’s try to up the innovative quotient on our conversations, no matter how tempted we are at the moment to tell everybody how “awesome!!” we are. And I hope little Becky’s feeling better.

Innovation Ecstasy

Last night, the Twin Cities got a serving of the hottest innovation event in the country when TEDxTC, an independent offshoot of the popular TED conference, was held at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

If you’re not familiar with TED, a quick look at the organization’s Web site can bring you up to speed. The conference features a who’s who in technology, entertainment, and design—the t-e-d in TED. The challenge is to prepare 18-minute presentations on “ideas worth spreading” for the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, United Kingdom.

In recent years, the conference’s topics have expanded to include business, science, and global issues, and it’s way too easy to spend an entire afternoon watching past presentations on the TED Web site.

The Twin Cities event focused on “The Extraordinary Capacity of Our Youth and the Shared Responsibility for Their Potential.” The speaker lineup featured locals Art Rolnick, senior vice president and director of research of the Federal Reserve Bank, Minneapolis; Terrie Rose, founder of Baby’s Space at the Tatanka Academy; and Peter Benson, president and CEO of the Search Institute. Each shared their insights into what Twin Cities organizations are doing for young people, and what we should be doing more of in the future.

The people that made it all possible included the Minnesota Community Foundation, industrial-design firm Worrell Inc., and the Science Museum of Minnesota. Let’s see if more local groups can step up to sponsor innovative programs like TedxTC—or start their own.

The only problem with TedxTC was the ticket shortage—they sold out within hours. Maybe the local TedxTC folks will apply some innovation to accommodating more people at next year’s conference—there’s no lack of interest.