Media Coverage

H&M TV Ads Feature Singer as a Blonde And Brunette; Study Shows One Performed Much Better

A Mercedes-Benz USA executive at the Luxury Roundtable: State of Luxury 2013 conference said that taking a risk when it was not mandatory helped the brand avoid becoming irrelevant and stagnant. During the “Balancing the Art and Soul of Risk” session, a Mercedes-Benz USA executive discussed the risk the brand took when launching its Super Bowl XLVII commercial for its CLA vehicle. The first CLA branded video featured model Kate Upton and was considered controversial before it went viral.

Tugging at the heartstrings: an eternal tactic of marketers of everything from coffee and peanut butter to long-distance phone services and those charities for abused and neglected animals. But a pickup truck? A tender spot for the tough Ram, "Farmer" turned out to be one of the most popular ads in all of Super Bowl XLVII—though flashy it wasn't. The creative, via The Richards Group, was a simple, two-minute slideshow featuring dramatic stills of American farmers set to the thunderous intonation of the late radio personality Paul Harvey. At the end, the screen fades to black before we’re shown the truck’s logo and the tagline, "Guts. Glory. Ram." No music, no humor, no action—just good old-fashioned sentimentality.

With television viewers thinking about eating better and saving money during the first few months of the year, LongHorn Steakhouse and its casual-dining peers benefited and broke through with their commercials, according to a first-quarter study from Ace Metrix. For the study, Ace Metrix calculated an Ace Score, a proprietary measurement of how persuasive and watchable consumers rate commercials, for hundreds of brands. The Mountain View, Calif.-based advertising research firm found that dinnerhouses had the highest Ace Scores due in large part to low price points, low calorie counts and fancy food shots.

A spot for Kraft Foods’ new Cool Whip Frosting pulled the highest Ace Score (680) of all ads tracked by Ace Metrix in the first quarter, including the highest-scoring Super Bowl ads. Only two Super Bowl ads made the Q1 Ace top 10: Budweiser’s “Brotherhood” and Mercedes-Benz’s star-studded “Soul” ad. Further, no Oscar ads made the top 10. The Cool Whip Frosting spot, “Mistreated and Hurt,” spoofs charitable fundraising commercials by showing images of badly frosted cakes with a grave voiceover: “Sadly, every year, millions of innocent cakes are mangled, mistreated and hurt. But there is something you can do. Go to the freezer section and pick up new Cool Whip Frosting…It’s whipped, fluffy and perfectly sweet, so it spreads on easily, leaving cakes unharmed.”

Fox Business New's Diane Macedo on TurboTax dominating the TV and video advertising scene.

Media analysis firm Ace Metrix released a sneak peak at its rankings of 2013 Oscar commercial effectiveness in an interview with Examiner.com Feb. 27. Among the top 2013 Oscar commercial performers were spots by McDonald’s, JCP and Coke, Ace reported. According to Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll, this year’s field of Oscar commercials did not perform as well as those from last year’s Academy Awards. They received average scores that were about 10 percent lower than 2012. One problem with the 2013 Oscar commercials: They were recycled. Ace reported that only 23 of 40 commercials were new, and several had already been used last year.

The Super Bowl is over, but Marketing Charts has done a yeoman’s job in collecting and summarizing advertising stats for the record, or just plain interesting. Their report starts with the Ace Metrix scores, which reflect the persuasive nature of the commercial (through desire, relevance, information, attention, change, and likability) and its watchability. Combined, the overall effectiveness score is designed to understand how a commercial fared from the angles of both voluntary consumer consumption, and the business goal of the advertiser.

Congrats to the Ravens and the Clydedales, crowned Super Bowl champions. Budweiser’s ad triumph on Super Bowl Sunday led to more than 10 million YouTube views for the spot, and growing. Yes, animals play well with the American Super Bowl-viewing audience. But more important...

THE reactions to the advertising bowl that was played inside Super Bowl XLVII are offering a fascinating look at the dominant types of commercials — emotional and humorous — that Madison Avenue prefers for its big event. Most of the 46 commercials that ran nationally on CBS during the game can fit into one of those camps, and it was those spots that seem to have generated the most responses, positive and negative, in the many polls and surveys that were taken during and after the game.

When the lights went out at the Super Dome in New Orleans on Sunday night, sportscasters vamped desperately and the social media team at Oreo jumped to action. Within minutes, the cookie brand produced, approved, and posted a joke graphic on Twitter about dunking in the dark – and won praise (alongside brands such as Audi and Tide ) for nimble social media marketing. But according to research firm Ace Metrix, which tracks the effectiveness of U.S. advertisement, this year’s Super Bowl also showed that social media ad campaigns have their limits.

Taco Bell and Subway, the two foodservice brands to run national, in-game commercials during Sunday’s broadcast of the Super Bowl, performed well when it was their turn to get in the game, according to research from firms DigitalCoCo and Ace Metrix.

The final results are in, and Budweiser's "Brotherhood" ad featuring its iconic Clydesdales was indeed the most effective ad of the Super Bowl, according to Ace Metrix. The 60-second spot achieved an Ace Score of 665. Mountain View, Calif.-based Ace Metrix measures 500 consumers who watch and score each ad across a variety of standardized metrics. In addition to the ubiquitous Clydesdale spot, Anheuser-Busch debuted three-and-a-half minutes of new ad creative, including spots for Anheuser-Busch's two newest brands, Budweiser Black Crown and Beck's Sapphire -- both of which made their national TV debut.

Featured on Fox Business News Monday morning following the Big Game, Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll breaks down Super Bowl ad war winners and losers.

For a while there I was despairing for the future of football. An ad for milk – milk! – was running as the top Super Bowl spot, at least during the first quarter, according to Ace Metrix. Granted the Got Milk? ad featured The Rock, but still—this is the Super Bowl, after all.

We have been evaluating the impact of ads for some time now–some 30,000 of them—and we’ve seen a variety of creative concepts come and go with each Super Bowl. Some brilliant, memorable and now part of pop culture. Some mediocre and forgettable. Some downright terrible. This year’s creative concept/theme is the growing application of social media in the development, support and scripting of ads. It’s not entirely new–there have been “social hobbyists” for a few years now. But what is new is that most brands are now dabbling in this cross-media experimentation in some form or another.

Before his doping downfall and confession to Oprah Winfrey, Lance Armstrong was among the most sought-after product endorsers, with deals from Nike, Oakley, Trek, 24-Hour Fitness and more. Those lucrative days are now over, which makes it hard to believe that just three years ago Mr. Armstrong starred on advertising's biggest stage: the Super Bowl. Check out his performance above in a 30-second ad for AB-InBev's low cal beer, Michelob Ultra. The commercial, which finds Mr. Armstrong living the "Ultra Life," ran in the 2010 Super Bowl. Like other marketers, A-B parted ways with Lance as evidence mounted last year of his performance-enhancing-drug use. But the brewer hung onto him as long as it could, along with Nike and Oakley.

Peter Daboll weighs in on the Super Bowl ads we'll see on Sunday, Feb. 3.

Doritos' seven-year-old "Crash the Super Bowl" campaign looks a little tired from some angles. Every year the PepsiCo brand rolls out a new contest gimmick to plug the consumer-generated ad contest, but every year the winning commercials seem to rely on the same lowbrow devices -- including a plethora of pet tricks. But there is no denying that the campaign still works, at least as judged by the average tortilla-chip-munching Joe. Indeed, plenty of ad agencies would love to post the stellar scores the campaign routinely gets from various Super Bowl ad-ranking services. Doritos had two of the four most-effective Super Bowl spots last year as judged by Ace Metrix, which evaluates video ad effectiveness, and has won the USA Today Ad Meter polling in three of the last four years.

As they climbed back from Prohibition, booze marketers in the 1930s served up responsibility ads to shield a product some still considered sinful. "We Who Make Whiskey Say: Drink Moderately" consumers were told, according to accounts of the ads by the Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. Eight decades later, it's the soda inddustry under fire, blamed for the nation's obesity epidemic. While a pop prohibition isn't at hand, soda marketers can learn from their booze-selling brethren in combating their fiercest critics.

While Coca-Cola’s new TV ad addressing obesity issues has been labeled cynical or an exercise in damage control by critics, consumers’ initial reactions are notably positive, according to Ace Metrix. Ace’s survey of a representative sample of more than 500 U.S. consumers, using its usual battery of questions probing perceptions to TV ads, yielded an Ace Score of 669 for the initial, two-minute ad in Coca-Cola’s “Together for Good” campaign -- making it one of the top five TV ads to break in the past 90 days (out of more than 2,000).

A study of the most effective advertisers in the restaurant industry by Ace Metrix revealed that “America’s love affair with casual dining” continued in 2012, the advertising research firm’s executive vice president of marketing, Jonathan Symonds, said. After asking thousands of survey respondents to rank brands’ TV commercials based on how persuasive and watchable they were, Ace Metrix calculated its proprietary Ace Score for each restaurant. The Mountain View, Calif.-based firm found that restaurants’ ads performed best when they focused on food, but within the context of affordability and the dining environment.

Samsung made the most effective commercial of the year, says analytics firm Ace Metrix, but it wasn't for a cell phone. While 72andSunny should be commended for its snarky, Apple bashing Galaxy spots, Samsung's ad for a huge french door refrigerator actually performed best with viewers as the most creatively effective ad of 2012.

The commercial that received the highest average score last year from viewers of national television ads in a closely followed survey was not a glitzy Super Bowl spot or an emotional Olympics spot. Nor was it a commercial that was sexy, snarky or stuffed with celebrities. Rather, the commercial, for a French-door refrigerator from Samsung with 31.6 cubic feet of space, was straightforward, something in the show-and-tell vein. The spot offered a lighthearted demonstration of the capacity of the fridge by showing a family coming home from a shopping trip and filling it up bucket-brigade style, by tossing oversize packages of food from kid to Dad to kid to kid to Mom.

Samsung offered up three of the top 10 most effective ads of 2012, according to one metric. An ad for a new larger refrigerator led the pack, while a spot for its Galaxy Note came in third and one for a new tablet finished in a tie for ninth, according to Ace Metrix. In second place in the overall rankings was a spot that also had refrigerator involvement as part of a wider branding-type ad for Frigidaire. That ninth-place tie included a spot for the iPhone 5 backing its camera abilities and featuring cute kids, and one for Outback Steakhouse, which promoted special offers for military personnel.

Samsung got a lot of attention, not to mention video views, for its funny send up of the Apple iPhone faithful in its Galaxy ads in 2012. But humor and celebrity users like LeBron James weren't enough to unseat Apple as the most effective mobile phone advertiser in 2012, according to ad effectiveness research firm Ace Metrix. Samsung did win the hard-fought tech category overall -- which includes PCs, tablets, phones and TVs -- by producing numerous high-quality spots for its myriad products. "It's one thing to create a great ad. It's another to do a consistent good job over 45 or 50 executions," Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll said.