Ad Design/Development - A Super Sunday

Submitted by Mitch Seigel on Tue, 2/08/2011

The Super Bowl has come and gone, but not the conversations about the commercials. What were your favorites? Bud Light, Volkswagen, Doritos, Go Daddy?

They were all there. Do you remember them? That is probably the most critical question anyone can ask. If people cannot remember them, than a lot of time and money has been wasted. Most likely, serious testing has been done pre-super bowl, to ensure a higher chance of success.

The design of an ad for any medium is as important, and sometimes more important than the media that is bought. If the components of a good commercial are missing, the message is fighting an uphill battle to succeed.

Career Builder, with its monkeys uses humor to drive their message. They assume that everyone knows what Career Builder is, and if monkeys can understand, so can everyone else.

Doritos uses the Super Bowl to conduct a contest for best commercial. The dog flying through the house door at his owner again used humor to attract attention to the brand.

One commercial which I feel went overboard to drive a point home, was Kia’s Optima commercial. I must admit it worked, I remember the brand and the product. But now that the Super Bowl is over and generally you don’t run one to two minute commercials like in the game, the series of scenes are too complex to have the audience piece it all together. Last night I saw one of the sections of the commercial in a TV program, and it seemed to stop unfinished, in my mind, because I had seen the complete commercial during the game the day before.

Too much information can be confusing in a short period of time. This is a common mistake in advertising. The thirty second radio commercial with forty five seconds of copy. The six column inch newspaper ad with enough copy to fill a half page. A website home page, with so much going on, you don’t where to begin reading.

The KISS method works best. Brand. Unique Selling Proposition. Where to find it. Deadline. With TV or cable, show it and describe it. With Radio describe it more in-depth. With online ads you want to engage the consumer.

For a football game that was so close and kept us in our seats for the entire game, the commercials did a good job of doing the same. What will they come up with for next year’s game?

What are your challenges when it comes to designing and developing ads? I look forward to hearing your comments.

Until next time …