Episode 011: Super Bowl 2022 Commercials Review

EP 11: Super Bowl LVI Ads Review

Firetoss Marketing Podcast

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00:08
Here we go. Not just your average podcast, it’s the slightly above average podcast. Brought to you by your favorite marketing team at Firetoss. Here it is, your true source for all things digital marketing, the Firetoss Marketing Podcast.

00:27
Tony Passey: Welcome to another edition of the Firetoss Marketing Podcast. Today: Joining me are two super special people. Kirk Madsen, our Executive Creative Director here at Firetoss. Kirk, how’re you doing?

00:39
Kirk Madsen: Oh, I am fine. I have a Dr. Pepper sitting in front of me, waiting to be opened when you give me the call.

00:44
Tony: Oh, yeah, prove it. Let’s hear it, let’s do this.

00:46
Kirk: I like this.

00:46
*sound of a soda can being opened*

00:51
Malia Bonte: That was nice.

00:53
Tony: I kind of smell it from over here. Just that initial CO2.

00:58
Malia: How is it?

00:58
Tony: Oh, man. I’m ready for the rest of the day, it’s beautiful. Also joining us today is Malia Bonte. Malia is the director of our marketing management group here at Firetoss. Malia, Thank you. Thank you for being on.

01:11
Malia: You’re welcome.

01:12
Tony: Now, I say thank you because Malia was not prepared to be on the podcast today.

01:17
Malia: Nope.

01:18
Tony: Neither was Kirk.

01:19
Kirk: Not a bit.

01:21
Tony: So, I literally just said, “hey, guys, I have this plan. There’s something I’ve been thinking about for the last couple of weeks”. I’m so excited. I was thinking about this leading up to the Super Bowl and then the Super Bowl happened and then the game day analytics challenge of the University of Utah happened and now here we are and I’m so excited. So, let me explain what we’re doing, what all of this is and hopefully everybody listening can sympathize with you guys that there is no show plan here, that I have literally just sprung this on you. But I think it’s going to be a good conversation because there’s some really neat advertising and there’s a lot of creativity. The Super Bowl is literally the Super Bowl of advertising as well. It’s where we put out the biggest ads, the best ads. This year, we saw some crazy celebrity interaction. We saw some disruptive ads from people like Coinbase. What’s really interesting, Kirk, did you watch the Super Bowl?

02:15
Kirk: Not even a minute.

02:17
Tony: Malia, did you watch Super Bowl?

02:19
Malia: Neither did I, not a minute.

02:20
Tony: Yeah. I love this. This is so great. I love tech people. We care so much about football. Wait, but did either of you play fantasy football this year?

02:28
Malia: I did.

02:29
Tony: Did either of you beat me? No, not even close. I did watch the Super Bowl. I watched almost every minute of it until Valentine’s Day dinner had to happen and my wife and I left in the fourth quarter. But I was at a nice steak house and I kept my phone open on the side of my table. I watched the final result and it was glorious. But I don’t know if you guys are like me. But when you do watch the Super Bowl, do you pay attention to the commercials?

02:56
Malia: I used to.

02:58
Tony: Yeah, the commercials are a big deal for me and so much of a big deal that a few years back, I got invited to jump in on some research with one of the professors at the University of Utah. His name is Dr. Chong Oh. He’s the director of the IS department for undergrads and grads. Super awesome professor and he was doing some studying of the effect of a Super Bowl ad on Twitter. So, imagine all of us surfing the couch, eating a ton of food watching the Super Bowl and then on comes a commercial. The commercial could potentially piss you off, it could entertain you, it could be so hilarious that you’re like, “ah, that commercial check this out.” Peter Dinklage battling Morgan Freeman, which by the way was a few years ago, one of my favorite commercials of all time.

There’s so much information that is coming at us in such a short period of time, that Super Bowl advertising is this incredible rite of passage for me. I love to study it! So, a few years back, we created a competition at the University of Utah for the information system students. So, these are not computer programmers per se. They’re not the marketers, but they are the data people. So, they’re going to have some marketing skills. They’re going to have some programming skills. But really, it’s a lot about databases and processing data, some machine learning, a little bit of AI stuff that goes on there. So, they do this competition where they build 200 servers. They build these Python servers that sit and monitor Twitter, during the Super Bowl from the beginning kickoff all the way till the final. They monitor all the reactions to the commercials and they gather this database. And this year, it was something like 2 million tweets. They gathered about 2 million tweets that were related to… they were related to hashtags and app mentions that were related to the Super Bowl. So, for example, one of the most popular ads during the Super Bowl was the Kanye West commercial. The Kanye West commercial, which is funny because everybody calls it that, but it was actually a McDonald’s commercial. You guys want to see it?

05:10
Malia: Yep.

05:10
Kirk: Yes.

05:11
Tony: Here we go.

05:13

05:40
Tony: It’s hilarious to me.

05:45
Malia: There’s like no Kanye in there. There was a second of Kanye.

05:52
Tony: There’s a second of Kanye. There’s a second of Kanye that everybody raved about, right? And people called it the Kanye commercial. So, you’ve got Kanye West rolling up in the drive thru in some all-terrain, tank looking vehicle, and he’s in it for a second and a half. And that’s the entire thing. Everybody called it the Kanye vehicle.. or the Kanye commercial. But what’s interesting is the number of tweets, the hundreds of 1000s of tweets related to this commercial were almost entirely about Kanye West, absolutely insane. Let me show you another one. This was the most popular commercial of the Super Bowl and it’s the trailer for Moon Knight, which is the latest Marvel superhero.

06:36

07:04
Tony: So, you’ve got this moon night character and it just goes through what you would expect from a typical Marvel release. Except for what was so exciting about it is: it’s Disney, it’s Marvel, it’s a new superhero. And it just…Literally hundreds of thousands of tweets. Now, not the most exciting commercial in my opinion. But it brought so many people to Twitter and had them just going crazy. And then probably one of the most creative ads of the Super Bowl, was a Super Bowl Ad that was called stuff. Who is this actor? Do you remember who this actor is?

07:44
Malia: I don’t.

07:45
Kirk: Ewan McGregor.

07:46
Tony: Ewan McGregor. Okay, so, we’ll watch a little bit of that so, you can see this stuff.

07:51

08:11
Tony: It’s really funny how it slaps all the commercials in the face.

08:14
[Expedia Ad continues to play]

08:37
Tony: You see the Bitcoin in the background?

08:42
[Expedia Ad continues to play]

08:49
Kirk: That man could do a diaper commercial and I’d be okay with it because of his voice.

08:54
Tony: Ahh, it’s so good, isn’t it?

08:55
Malia: I liked that.

08:57
Tony: So good. So, you’ve got Ewan McGregor trying to go against all the other commercials. I mean, so, the Super Bowl analytics competition that we do up at the U, the students take this 2 million,2 million and a half tweet database (it kind of fluctuates every year) and they clean the data and they get to a data set that they’re comfortable with, that they can rely on. Meaning they’ve taken out all the duplicates, they’ve taken out things that really aren’t related to the Super Bowl. Some of those tweets might be really mean tweets and some of those tweets are very positive tweets about the brands, and about the various actors and actresses that are in this. But then what the competition is: is which student group can go through and derive the best insights from what is being said. So, think about it. If you were an advertiser and you spent… By the way, do you guys know how much 30 seconds during the Super Bowl costs?

09:54
Malia: 6.5 million this year, right?

09:56
Tony: Yep. 6.5 was the average. There are some that are 5.5. Coinbase ran a 60 second ad, $13 million for 60 seconds. So, if you are spending $13 million to air 60 seconds, which by the way, how much production cost went into that Ewen McGregor ad that we just saw, what do you think it cost to produce this? He’s not getting out of bed for less than a million dollars to show up and do this. Plus, you’ve got green screens and production crews. They literally had set after set, set up that could have been a $10 million commercial, that they then are going to spend $5 million to air five and a half, six and a half million in that range and then they’ll probably play it. They’ll get another $20 million worth of airtime out of it before they retire the commercial. So, there’s a lot of money that goes into this. So if you were about t0, let’s say, Kirk, you are the creative director and you’re in the meeting, and you’re talking to Expedia. What are you telling Expedia to convince them to do this commercial? Or would you tell them not to do the commercial because there’s people that abstain from the Super Bowl every year. You have the Pepsi, halftime, but you don’t see Coke in their bidding for that halftime. So, Coke is doing a whole different strategy, I don’t know. Any thoughts? I mean, how do you measure the success or failure of one of these ads?

11:25
Malia: That’s hard. Because even when you’re looking at the numbers, when we’re looking at Twitter engagement, and looking at the cost per engagement, if you’re just looking at the sheer value of the commercial, not any of the production, I thought it was high. I mean $14 for someone to “like” something.

11:41
Tony: When you can get that “like” done on Instagram for $1.

11:47
Malia: It seemed a lot higher, I thought it would be cents and so, to see those dollar values even, I was surprised.

11:53
Tony: Yeah. So, one of the groups that did the analytics competition, Kirk, they took the total cost versus the reach, and came up with an engagement price. And we’ll look at a couple of these here in a second. But you got to think about, what are you putting into this ad and how do you get people’s attention? So, year after year, I’ve sat there and I’ve judged these competitions and seeing these student groups come forward with these infographics. Now, the results of the student competition is an infographic. Where the student group will develop some insights, they’ll say: which ad got the most tweets by volume, which one got the meanest tweets, which ones got the most positive tweets, which one, uh.. Was better to air an ad in the first quarter or the fourth quarter, in order to get engagement? Was it better to have a puppy or a horse? Or Budweiser does a horse and a puppy. Was it better to have a horse and a puppy Or is it better to have Ewan McGregor? I mean, ya know, that Ewan McGregor commercial, like the most platonic way, Kirk, you’re completely in love with Ewan McGregor after 60 seconds. Is that worth the…

13:01
Kirk: 4! I was completely in love with Ewan McGregor after four seconds.

13:10
Tony: At 4 seconds Kirk is ready to ride off into the sunset and go have an Expedia good time with Ewan McGregor. But is the million dollars spent on the actor, Is that really the best investment? Or could a cute puppy for… I don’t know on KSL for 100 bucks? I don’t know what it cost. But could you get a cute puppy and it does the same thing? So, there’s just a lot of these formulaic decisions that have to be made about constructing a Super Bowl ad. So, what we do is we challenge the students to go in, understand the data, come up with their own insights, and then display the data. And the infographics that they, I’ll bring a couple of them up here in a second. And anybody listening to this, if they want to see the infographics, you can actually go into our podcast page on Firetoss.com/podcast and you can look at the recent episodes. And we have a blog post where we’ve put every one of the infographics that are winners. You can actually click into them and see what they are and then there’s a little write up and everything about all of this as well. So, at the moment that you’re hearing this, all of this can be found online. So, feel free to go check this out and see what some of these infographics look like. Now, the students that are doing these, they’re not artists, they’re not you know, they’ll buy some templates online, or they’ll have like one of them that’s a little more artsy. It’s not about trying to impress people with… um, I’m going to say this correctly with the colors and the fonts. It’s more about how they lay out the data. So, when we judge it, we do look at did they communicate the point? And that’s really important. And we also look at, did they have insights that nobody else came up with? So, I want to show you a few of these but before I get there. Do you want to know what was one, the most insanely successful ads of the entire Super Bowl?

15:04
Malia: Tell us Tony.

15:06
Tony: Coinbase. Okay, so, you guys are familiar with the Clio awards. Do you know what the Clio’s are? C-L-I-O? So, for the best movies, it’s the Oscars. For the best Tony Awards, you can win a Tony for singing on Broadway. A Clio would be for commercials. An Emmy would be for Television. Okay, so, the Clio awards happen every year. But a little while back, I don’t know how many years it has even been around, but Clio, they came up with something they called the Super Clio. And literally just moments after the Super Bowl is done, a panel of 20 jurors will award a super Clio to the best advertisement of the Super Bowl. The Coinbase ad was actually the Clio winner. You ready for this?

15:51
Kirk: This year?

15:52
Tony: This year, like two weeks ago, when the Super Bowl happened. Okay, you ready for this Kirk? This ad is going to blow your mind. Here it comes.

16:02

16:09
Tony: You want to see this in full screen, don’t you?
[Coinbase Ad continues playing]

16:16
Kirk: Wasn’t this a screensaver from Microsoft in years past?
[Coinbase Ad continues playing]

16:20
Tony: The DVD player. This is the DVD player.
[Coinbase Ad continues playing]

6:26
Malia: Do you think it’s going to hit the corner?
[Coinbase Ad continues playing]

16:32
Kirk: I’m digging the beat though.
[Coinbase Ad continues playing]

16:34
Tony: If anybody listening hasn’t seen this ad, all we’re looking at is a QR code that slowly changes colors and is bouncing around the corners of a black screen. It looks exactly like the pause menu or no disk menu on a DVD player. There was even… oh… ugghhhh

16:58
Kirk: There was… They ended it the right way.

17:00
Tony: They ended it with it hitting the corner. Wasn’t this amazing? Did you see that final screen? So, once it finally hits the corner, they have this complete like 1995, Blue window style background and it literally just says paid for by Coinbase. And then it has the URL, which is drops.coinbase.com. And if you scan the QR code, that’s where it would take you. And what their entire gimmick was for the Super Bowl is that if you scan the QR code, you came to Coinbase, they would give you $15 in free crypto. 15 bucks to anybody that wanted it.

17:43
Malia: Do you know how many times this aired?

17:45
Tony: One time.

17:48
Malia: Dang.

17:45
Tony: Do you know how many people visited the coin base website? Within like, a couple of minutes of this thing airing, they had 20 million visitors to the Coinbase site. And they won’t admit that the site actually crashed. But the site totally crashed. What they said is, “oh, it didn’t crash, we were just throttling the traffic.” I don’t know about you guys, if I go to a website and it doesn’t work…

18:14
Kirk: You bounce.

18:15
Tony: It crashed, it’s over. So, this was a completely oppositional, kind of disruptive, going against everything. Because if you look at the entire class of Super Bowl ads, for the last 5-10 years, it’s a little bit of humor, and an attractive or popular actor, or maybe several actors in a Super Bowl commercial. But whoever is popular at that moment, there’s some kind of Puppy, Cat, Horse. Animals are a really big thing. Upbeat tempo, There’s kind of this formula that you’ll see. Like Expedia with Ewan McGregor, you’ve seen Doritos do this. You’ve seen Mountain Dew do this. You’ve seen Procter & Gamble with all of their brands. I mean, it’s a pretty clear formula of how to create an award-winning Super Bowl ad. Then all of a sudden, I mean can you imagine what this would have cost or what this didn’t cost to do this Coinbase ad. You could have easily built this coin base ad for under 10 grand. I mean even hiring an expensive agency, which the agency they hired for this was not a cheap agency. This was the product of an agency called Accenture Interactive. It’s the agency arm of a huge consulting company that does everything from accounting consulting to infrastructure to media advertising. So, this was the brainchild of Accenture Interactive, and that’s who ultimately won the Clio award. But I can’t imagine that this cost more than $10-20,000, even in a huge agency. So, in a field of people that are spending millions, you’ve got somebody that shows up with the most disruptive ad. I don’t know, what do you guys think about it? Do you think it’s a good move? I think it’s a bad move?

18:32
Malia: I mean, I think it worked. So, I would have to say it’s a good move, but it’s definitely different. I know, there were a lot of groups in the analytics competition that left Coinbase out of their datasets. They said, “it’s too different.” Some people said, “oh, maybe this is the way to go. Maybe everything’s changing.” But I really liked that some people said, “you know what, I’m just leaving this out completely.” It’s not really entertaining unless you know what it’s from. It’s not very informative. It doesn’t inspire anyone. It’s just there, it doesn’t fall into any of the categories. So, I liked that people left it out. I don’t think that it would be entertaining if everyone did the same thing like that.

20:57
Tony: Oh, yeah, that’d be the worst Super Bowl ever.

20:59
Malia: It’d be terrible!

21:00
Tony: And it’s only tricky to do one time.

21:01
Malia: No one would be able to look at puppies, so…

21:03
Tony: A Super Bowl without puppies is no Super Bowl at all.

21:07
Malia: This is true.

21:08
Tony: I want that on my tombstone.

21:10
Kirk: What if it was just a puppy and a QR code? Like, would that win?

21:15
Tony: Can we shave a QR code on the side of a puppy? Is there, like, a PETA violation there? I feel like there is. No QR codes were hurt during the filming of this podcast.

21:26
Malia: Puppies maybe.

21:27
Tony: Okay, so, I have up on our screen. Again, you guys are welcome to go to Firetoss.com/podcasts and you can find links to this. I have up on the screen, the first-place winner from the undergraduate division in this competition, and I’m a little bit salty. It was a UVU team, Utah Valley University that won the U of U game day analytics challenge. So, there were teams from BYU, UVU, BYU Idaho, ya know, kind of throughout the region. There was a bunch of different teams. But this team came up with some incredible insights. So, six and a half million dollars was the price for a 30 second ad. There were 66 unique advertisers. 36 million households reached. And their data set, they pared it down to 1.3 million tweets. So, they said the most engaging ad of the Super Bowl was Disney. Again, when we say Disney, we’re talking about the Marvel Studios Moon Knight trailer. But there was a lot of discussion about this because… This wasn’t as spectacular or anticipated of a trailer as, like, Iron Man, or Thor, or one of the superhero movies that we’ve already had. Moon Knight. I mean, Kirk, you’re somebody who is super into superheroes and the movies, did you even know that Moon Knight was a thing?

22:52
Kirk: No, not at all.

22:55
Tony: I’ve never even heard of it.

22:58
Kirk: I mean, visually, it was pretty stunning to look at. I felt like it was a white Batman.

23:02
Tony: White batman. So, it’s fine. You can see we’re not super excited about it. But, one of the things that some of these groups that were studying these tweets… Is one of the things that they came up with is they were able to point out that if you are a Disney and you already have a huge following, then the ad that you show is going to be huge. So, if you already have people that care about you, or have followed and liked your brand, then they’re going to continue to follow and like your brand. So, that was something that was kind of interesting. They also were looking at which ones created the biggest buzz, which ones had important celebrities. So, the top eight. What do people really think about the top 8 commercials by sentiment, polarity, subjectivity. So, this particular group was able to go through and talk about engagement versus positive sentiment. So, when we talk about sentiment, was the tweet a positive tweet? Or was somebody just really mad about the tweet? Like, “oh, Moon Knight, you suck. I hate this,” were they tweeting negative things?

24:20
Kirk: I have a question.

24:21
Tony: Yeah, go ahead, Kirk.

24:23
Kirk: Is that uhhh… Is that a positive tweet, or is that a negative tweet? Kanye’s coming commercial. What I can’t figure out is that positive? “uhhhhh”

24:38
Malia: That was the name of a commercial.

24:41
Kirk: I’m just curious. I don’t know how you rate that. Because isn’t “uh” technically just right in the middle?

24:47
Tony: This is something that nobody brought out during the entire competition. I’m really curious, I’d like to go back to the dataset and see how many times people just tweeted, “uh…”. It’s got to be in there

24:58
Kirk: It’s gotta be somewhere, right?

25:00
Tony: It’s interesting. It was.. So, I want to read you a couple of stats here. So, of the 1.3 million tweets, Marvel, the word “Marvel” was mentioned 218,000 times. The words “Moon Knight”: 144,000 times. “Kanye”: 136,000 times. “Rings”, because Lord of the Rings, there’s this anticipated Lord of the Rings: 76,000 times. And then Coinbase. I just talked about how it was super Cleo, super disruptive. But it was only mentioned 74,000 times. Now, which topic is more popular on social media? Kanye is obviously more popular than Coinbase. I think that’s why there were so many more mentions. But here’s what I think is really ironic, really interesting. I’ve never heard anybody in the last two weeks refer to that ad as anything other than, “the Kanye ad.”

25:58
Malia: I didn’t even know it was a McDonald’s ad.

26:00
Tony: Yeah! So, where’s McDonalds? Where’s their brand name in the top five mentions, top six, top 10? “McDonald’s” doesn’t even appear anywhere on any of the research. I’ll look at this one graph, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. It puts the brand McDonald’s in eighth place.

26:19
Malia: So, am I supposed to want to go to McDonald’s now, because Kanye goes to McDonald’s? Is that…?

26:24
Tony: The answer is, ’uh…” I don’t honestly know that I’m ever supposed to want to go to McDonald’s. It’s just kind of a shameful thing that happens.

26:40
Kirk: Tell that to my seven-year-old.

26:42
Tony: We had a little argument in our house. We’ve got four kids; we had argued over the weekend where my wife talked about how we rid our entire family of McDonald’s for almost seven years and now it’s back. Because our younger kids brought it back. What are you going to ask Malia?

26:57
Malia: Something interesting about the engagement, though, it’s the sum of quite a few things. And knowing that, and then seeing that some of these different commercials, they had, say, really high original tweets. Whereas some had really really high favorites. So, Coinbase, for example, it may have been coin base. It wasn’t tons of original tweets, it was just a bunch of replies to Coinbases tweet, or it was favorites, or retweets. And so there was this…

27:27
Tony: Except for Coinbase’s tweets, they were all, “hey, guys, super sorry, servers went down.” It wasn’t, “hey, Coinbase for the win.” It was seriously, “What? We didn’t crash. We just throttled the traffic for a minute. Try back in three minutes.” So, most of the buzz about Coinbase, I’m sure there were some people that like “whoa, sick black screen with a bouncing square” like… but I can’t imagine people were looking at that ad and making artistic comments. There might have been a few. But I would have to guess that most of the Coinbase comments are literally based on a bouncing square that goes to a website that doesn’t work and what a fail. I didn’t actually see a single sentiment index analysis on Coinbase. But what is interesting… I’m gonna zoom in on this one. So, in the first place, if you’re looking at the infographic, at the bottom right corner of the first-place winner, there is this tweet frequency for the top eight by brand. And they did something really cool with their data. So, they took where everybody was tweeting, and then they normalized everybody down to zero at the time their ad showed.

So, let me see if I explain this better. Sometimes an ad will air in the first quarter, sometimes it’ll air in the second quarter and the third quarter and we’ve seen a lot of data that says the first half of the game is the best time to run your ads, you’ll get way more engagement, people are super into the game, and then they float off and they start to pay attention to other things. Maybe the alcohol sets in, maybe the food coma sets in, for whatever reason, the thumbs are not moving as fast. And so, there’s not nearly as many tweets. Well, we’d still wanted to look at from the moment zero, that the ad shows how much engagement does an ad cause on Twitter? If you look at Disney, and again, Disney has the highest following of anybody in the Super Bowl, but Disney’s initial interaction was explosive. As soon as they showed their ad for the first time, tons of people took to Twitter and started talking about the Moon Knight ad, started talking about Disney, started talking about Marvel. So, it’s reflected in this graph. McDonald’s was the second one that was mentioned on Twitter, the McDonald’s ad. What’s interesting though, is mostly Kanye, like we mentioned, it wasn’t necessarily McDonald’s. And then NBC was the next one in terms of getting an initial bump, and then we had Amazon and Amazon Prime video, and then probably the lowest engagement was the AMC ad. But if you look at this, even though some of them had a huge spike, several of them continued on for a good 60 minutes after the ad had aired.

So, while some had largely died off versus their initial volume, some stayed pretty consistent. I’m not sure why people continued the conversation, why they kept talking about it. NBC, for me is a real standout because they continue to talk about it and talk about it. So, pretty interesting stuff. There’s one other one that I wanted to point out that I thought was super interesting. So, we did see three different major crypto advertisers’, in the Super Bowl. Coinbase was obviously there, we’ve talked a lot about it, eToro was there and then there’s a company called FTX. Now FTX is a huge company, but they’re mostly outside of the US, because they make a lot of their money and stuff that is regulated in the US. So, they don’t do tons here, which is my understanding. But these guys started to look at how the various Crypto Ads performed one versus the other. eToro and FTX, sort of follow the original model of let’s have a good storyline, let’s have a little bit of comedy, let’s engage people.

31:37
Malia: FTX had a celebrity too.

31:39
Tony: Yeah, FTX had a celebrity. But really Coinbase was the one that dominated that crypto market. But ya know, Crypto still… It’s interesting that crypto had such a huge showing in the Super Bowl. But crypto really wasn’t the biggest of all the advertisers. You still were dominated by McDonald’s and Amazon and car companies, and probably less car companies. But we still saw a lot of car ads in there, it was pretty interesting. The last thing that I want to point out, is one of the data points that kept surfacing over and over. There was an ad for I’m going to say it was Peels, it was oranges. I’m going to see if I can find this particular ad. I think it’s called the Peels Super Bowl commercial. So, it was… It was said to be probably the worst ad of the Super Bowl. I believe this is it, I think this is the right one.

32:59

33:19
Tony: So, the ad is ironic, it’s entertaining, but it’s got a very much like… Dollar Shave Club type quality to it. Ya know, it’s a little ironic, little campy, and it seems like it would play really well in that setting, especially against a McDonald’s ad and an Ikea ad. Except for this particular ad got the least possible engagement on Twitter. And I’ve been asking the question why over the last several days, I think it has something to do with the fact that, who do you follow on Twitter related to oranges? Nobody’s going to follow mandarin oranges. That’s not a profile. Peels is such an unknown company that ultimately it doesn’t matter how great your ad is if you want staying power, because people that saw the Super Bowl don’t even remember this ad. So many people that saw it and how sad would that be to have spent a million dollars reproducing your ad and another six and a half million playing the ad nobody remembers it happened.

34:02
Malia: It’s sad because I liked it.

35:04
Kirk: Yeah. I absolutely agree. Of the ones that you’ve shown me, the three commercials that we’ve looked at, I actually enjoyed the most, this one that we’re looking at right here.

35:15
Tony: I stopped it halfway through. And you’re like “ahh…”

35:17
Malia: I know. I’m sad. Does he finally get to teach someone how to peel?

35:21
Tony: Here we go, we’ll look at the rest.

35:23
[Peels Ad continues to play]

35:32
Tony: He punches the sign, he’s in an orange costume.

35:33
[Peels Ad continues to play]

36:20
Tony: Now, this ad, this is the two-minute-long format. The one they ran during the Super Bowl obviously wasn’t two minutes long. It was 30 seconds. So, it was pared down and so, there’s a lot of humor here. But I don’t know why. I asked myself, why didn’t this just blow up? Like, why wasn’t it interesting? Why doesn’t it go viral? If this had been created and aired 10 years ago, would this have gone viral?

36:48
Kirk: I would say yes. I mean, I look at this and it feels like the type of commercial that I would have enjoyed when I watched the Super Bowl, and that was 15 years ago. I stopped caring.

36:59
Malia: I like it. I know, I mean, how do you interact with an orange brand on Twitter? But I feel like people could probably tweet stuff like, “oh, man, John.”

37:10
Tony: I feel bad for this guy.

37:12
Malia: I would. I like this guy, when punches the sign.

37:15
Tony: Maybe we need to create a John Burke Twitter profile. We’ll just start tweeting orange stuff every day.

37:20
Kirk: But doesn’t this feel like office space, or Parks and Rec. ?

37:25
Malia: Which everyone loves.

37:26
Kirk: You think about 10 years ago, when those things were the huge things. Where they were doing this semi-interview with stuff going on. This would fall right into that category and I think would probably have exploded back in the day. People maybe are just a little tired of the format.

37:42
Tony: Well, so, we just gave you a taste. A lot of this is very visual. I’d love for everybody that listened to this podcast to go and check this out. Again, Firetoss.com/podcast. We’ll have a link right there at the top that says, “hey, you can click here to check out the Super Bowl ads” and if you have any feedback and you want to talk about ad stuff or things that we missed, feel free to email us over at [email protected]. Thank you, guys, for joining us. Malia, thank you for joining the podcast today. We’re going to have this lady back. She is absolutely amazing. Thank you, Malia for being here. Kirk, thank you once again for walking all the way from your office to my office and joining the podcast.

38:19
Kirk: It was worth it Dr. Pepper.

38:20
Tony: Ah, perfect. Okay, see you guys soon.

38:28
Thank you for listening to the Firetoss Marketing Podcast. Be sure to subscribe to get all the latest episodes and don’t forget to tell ten friends or you’ll have bad luck.