20-Yard Recession

Welcome to the first Drink Moxie of 2009 and the first of the Obama administration. It's a new world with new hopes and possibilities, or at least it was before we all realized that the money we thought we had didn't really exist. I apologize for the long lapse since the last posting, but apparently the recession has hit us at Drink Moxie as hard as it's hit everyone else. However, I can give you my personal assurance that as long as we keep buying products, and as long as our self-image is tied inexorably to how we feel about the products we buy, and as long as companies understand that and continue to both reflect and shape our culture through the use of advertising, we will be there.

Once again we begin our year by looking at the Super Bowl, that most American of advertising festivals. Every year I like to reflect a bit on what Super Bowl commercials mean, why the nation comes together at this particular time every year in celebration of our national brands. Yes, I'm aware that there is football involved, and that regardless of the tradition, it would still be an advertising extravaganza by virtue of the huge audience that is actually watching the game. But still. As an advertising opportunity, the timing just doesn't make sense. The Super Bowl comes a month after the holiday season, when no one is really buying anything. I was recently watching some stuff on DVR from back in December, 2008, and remarking at how quickly I had forgotten about the "Buy This! Now! Please?" attitude that characterized commercials around that time. Maybe that's why we at Drink Moxie weren't so interested in writing about commercials at the time ‒ they were just too overtly focused on selling products. Super Bowl commercials aren't trying to sell anything. They're doing what commercials ought to be doing, manipulating the perceptions of our lifestyles and defining our culture in such a way that their brands fit within it. There's something pure about it.

And that brings us back to the recession. If there were ever a time when commercials should have less to do with selling anything, now is that time. People are not buying, and they're not just not buying, they are afraid to want to buy for fear of looking greedy to all the other people who aren't buying. Buyers are not buying so much that the sellers are not selling, leading to the downward spiral we find ourselves in. And yet in light of this reality, our major brands took their responsibility seriously and mounted an advertising display in grand American bootstrap-oriented fashion. How did they do this? Perhaps taking a cue from our intrepid new President, they put their focus on conservation ‒ saving money while reducing our dependence on foreign brands. Indeed, they seemed to be abiding by the old "Three R's" of living green.

Reduce

You can't get much greener than Saatchi & Saatchi's offering for Miller High Life, part of its new campaign that self-consciously stresses the image of working-class sophistication that characterizes the "Champagne of Beers."



There was general agreement among the Drink Moxie personnel that this spot was the winner in the "doing less with more" category. Granted, it's not as if they just concentrated all their advertising effort into one second. They had run ads leading up to the Super Bowl explaining how they were going to run a one-second ad, ensuring that the novelty would not be lost on the viewing public, who might otherwise confuse it with a broadcasting mistake. Indeed, they did a nice job of weaving together the campaign's prior focus on establishing High Life as the low-brow high-brau with the economic realities that are facing the company and its customers alike (SAB Miller, I believe, is not doing all that bad). Moreover, as with most campaigns, it goes beyond the airwaves with a special website at www.1secondad.com where viewers can see alternate versions of the spot, making it possibly the first commercial-extension web page actually worth visiting.

But what really gave the spot its added value was the buzz. Its strategic placement right at the end of halftime ensured an entire half worth of discussing, "What happened to that one-second ad? Did we miss it?" In fact, we at Drink Moxie were busy talking about it when it unexpectedly aired, which meant that we had to rewind the DVR to watch it again, and a few more times just to get the full effect. Talk about leveraging existing resources to their maximum potential. If the new stimulus package can have the same multiplier effects as this commercial, we ought to be in pretty good shape.

Reuse

Of course if you can't come up with a good new money-saving idea, you can always just dust off some old material that worked for you before. That was Coke's approach.



So they played a little twist at the end, as a way of redirecting the focus onto Coke Zero, a product whose campaign (by Crispin Porter + Bogusky) centers around how it's pretty much exactly like classic Coke, except with no calories. I think this one explains itself. If it doesn't, you probably haven't seen this:



Recycle

Most advertisers, as tends to be the habit, fell back to the easiest but decidedly least "green" conservation approach of recycling old material into a new product. Bud Light (DDB Worldwide), SoBe (Arnell Group), E*TRADE (Grey New York) and many more all found new ways to repackage material from past campaigns. Doritos (Goodby Silverstein & Partners) went to the tried-and-true approach of injuring a gentleman with a strike to the crotch, a device so common there should be a word for it (groinecdoche?). I won't show them because they're not really worth showing. CareerBuilder.com (with Wieden + Kennedy) generated some more of its typical "how do you know it's time for a new job" material, nothing new but something that perhaps resonates a bit more with today's audience. The material seemed so ripe for recycling that Monster.com (which apparently does its own ad work, if you can call it that) used it too, resulting in a nice comedic effect but a further blurring of the difference between the two major competitors in the online job-search business.



Now, we here at Drink Moxie aren't the first to notice this year's trend towards recycled advertising, as seen in the New York Times' recap by Stuart Elliott. But Elliott seems to frame this in a disparaging way, perhaps implying that in this time of great need and despair, we the American people deserve more from our brands at a time like this. I see it differently. Popular advertising isn't just our bread and circus, a one-way stream of eye candy that entertains one part of our brain while the other parts are being brainwashed into spending money. Popular advertising is a dialogue that responds to how we see ourselves and our condition, and reassures us that the companies that make our lifestyles possible understand us. Advertisers need to show that they feel our pain, as better explained in Elliott's pre-Game analysis, and I think that's a good thing.

Plus, on the subject of feeling our pain, if the material we saw in Super Bowl commercials weren't so predictable and reassuring, how could we possibly have commercials like this a week later?



To be fair, there were some interesting new trends on display at Super Bowl XLIII, and surely we will be mining it for things to talk about in the coming weeks. So let's hang in there for another year. After all, with a little help and a cold Moxie, we made it through the Great Depression. Surely we'll make it through this one too.