A few weeks ago, Ace Metrix awarded Brand of the Year recognition to 20 brands that aired the most effective portfolio of ads in 2013. These 20 brands rose to the tops of their respective categories, beating out more than 900 of their peers to earn the honors. As with all other awards and lists that we publish, the process underlying the BOTY selections is strictly objective. We don’t pick the winners – the American TV audience does. In this post we’ll break down the one of those winners and discuss how it got there – specifically Bacardi, the top-ranked brand in the Beverages – Spirits category.
Every category has its unique set of characteristics. Some categories are demographically handicapped and tend to score low. Others have the advantage of broad appeal and tend to post higher overall scores. The Spirits category is firmly entrenched within the former group. Spirits skews heavily male, and appeals to an audience that consumes alcohol. As a result, the category is one of the lowest scoring in our database, and the second lowest scoring among the 20 BOTY categories in 2013.
Brands are eligible for BOTY recognition if they aired at least five unique ads within a qualifying category. A category qualifies for inclusion if it aired a total of at least 100 unique ads, and had five or more qualifying brands. Spirits met these criteria in 2013 with 117 unique ads and eight qualifying brands.
Bacardi earned Brand of the Year honors with an average Ace Score of 509, which was 14 points higher than runner-up Smirnoff. Jack Daniel’s was third at 474. As with most categories, there was a fairly wide range from the top to the bottom of the list. Bacardi’s average Ace Score was higher than the maximum single-ad Ace Scores of four of its peers. And the 115-point gap between Bacardi’s 509 average and the last place brand’s 394 average is similar to the first-to-last gaps in categories with much higher ad volume, including QSR (113 points), Household (118 points), and Video Games (122 points).
The key to winning Brand of the Year, as it is in sports, is avoiding the losing streak. With one exception, Bacardi steered clear of any serious missteps in 2013. Four of its six ads were upper- or upper-middle quintile. Furthermore, the lower-quintile spot, “1896 Revolution” (438), was re-purposed into the much more effective “No More Oppression” (536) ad that aired later in the year.
Bacardi pursued an informative tack with the majority of its creative last year. The brand has a long history, dating back to its founding in Cuba in 1862. Family run for seven generations, Bacardi emphasized its historical roots in four of the six spots that it aired. The two exceptions were product-focused ads promoting newer labels. The educational approach paid off. As we’ve seen with craft beer advertising, viewers tend to reward spots that lead with information with higher overall scores. A glimpse at the component score gaps between Bacardi and its Spirits peers shows that Bacardi achieved its widest gaps in Information and Attention, with Likeability and Change not far behind.
Bacardi’s highest scoring ad last year was the :30 “Come One Fate” spot, which first aired in November and scored 561. “Come One Fate” follows Bacardi’s 2013 playbook effectively, serving up facts about the company’s history and topping it off with imagery of Bacardi Gold being poured. The ad skewed to an affluent and slightly younger male audience. Importantly, the word cloud reveals what resonated with viewers. It’s not often that we see the word “history” show up in a word cloud, particularly in a large green font – reflecting how frequently and with positive scores that the word was used. “Interesting” also jumps out among the favorably used words, as does the brand itself. In fact, “Bacardi” was used in 13% of all optional verbatims, the second most commonly used word after “good” (15%).
With a 150-year history, the value of the Bacardi brand is evident in some of the new data that we’ve recently begun to collect from the field. In particular, the survey question regarding the best thing about an ad offers respondents six answers to choose from, including “The brand and everything it stands for”. Sticking to our “Come One Fate” example, we looked at average Ace Scores and percentage of respondents for each of the “best thing” response options. Recall that this ad scored 561. But among the 19% of respondents who selected “The brand and everything it stands for” as the best thing about that ad, the average Ace Score was 689. Both of these numbers are noteworthy. Despite the vivid scenery and music used in the ad, nearly two in 10 respondents identified the brand – not the visuals – as the best thing about the ad. And those that did so scored the ad some 128 points above the ad’s overall score, and more than 220 points above the category average. When coupled with good creative, the value of the brand jumps out in the data.
In addition, viewers’ ability to identify the Bacardi brand is evident in both the word cloud and in the ranked list from the open-ended brand ID survey question. Seventy-six percent of respondents identified “Bacardi” as the brand name in the “Come One Fate” ad. This percentage increases to 90% when including various mis-spellings of the Bacardi name.
Finally, drilling into the individual verbatims among Bacardi’s four informational ads sheds some light on the information that’s being recalled, and how these thoughts translate into scores at the respondent level. Using “learn” as our keyword, we can see mentions of Cuba’s revolution and of Bacardi’s founder – and the generally high scores associated with these responses. The history lesson was a unique approach in the Spirits category in 2013, but one that paid off with Brand of the Year recognition for Bacardi.
