Advertising ought to have a point
It’s that time of year again: Superbowl time. Traditionally I enjoy skipping the actual event and turning instead to the ads. Companies spend such a huge amount of time, creativity and money on them that it seems rude not to politely sit through to the end, bitter or otherwise.
This year they are getting talked about more than usual. Normally I read about which movie trailers played but this year Google ran an ad which made it into the mainstream press; dragging everything else behind it.
Google’s ad was pretty nice; whimsical and confident and with a simple message – namely search is a fact of life. As brands become increasingly switched on to the social side of commerce this positioning resonates.
What stood out for me, however, was the number of ads that were content to essentially waste time and money. Go Daddy drew lots of ire but, subjective views aside, at least it threw in the facts of the product.
Other brands weren’t so ambitious, relying instead on the media spend to impress the viewers. Why spend money on creative if all you are doing (from a semiotics perspective) is showing the company logo? Indeed, if no message and no values are conveyed then thirty seconds of a logo would not only be cheaper, it would arguably be more memorable also.
Advertising, of course, is the opportunity to be more than memorable. It offers the chance to inform as well.
And in these times, when buzzwords such as “social” and “conversation” are in such free-flow, what better form of dialogue is there than a contructive one?