With American Idol turning everyday singers into pop stars and YouTube bringing acclaim to wannabe filmmakers, it seems only fitting that Super Bowl advertisers would be the latest to embrace the trend of giving amateurs a shot at the big time.
This year a number of advertisers, including Doritos, Chevrolet and even the National Football League itself, held contests for creating ads or ideas for ads to run in the year's biggest showcase for US advertising.
At a reported average price of US$2.6 million for a 30-second spot during the national championship football game, which airs on Feb. 4 on CBS Corp's CBS network, taking a chance on an amateur is not for the faint of heart.
The NFL and Chevy are taking out some of the uncertainty by bringing in professional talent to make the ideas generated by contestants into finished ads.
Doritos, however, said it would air an ad from one of five finalists that was made entirely by the contestants.
Ann Mukherjee, vice president for marketing at PepsiCo Inc's Frito-Lay unit, which makes Doritos, said the submitted ads have not been edited "one iota."
"Any big gain is going to take a lot of risk, and we went in with our eyes wide open," said Mukherjee. "It was really an effort to give our consumers control over their brand in an age where consumers really want a voice over what they love."
By reaching out to consumers, advertisers are embracing the latest buzz topic in the media and entertainment business: "user-generated content," a phenomenon that has many worried that people will spend more time watching YouTube or hanging out on MySpace than reading magazines, going to the movies or spending time with other traditional media.
Doritos solicited submissions online for its contest and got more than 1,000 entries. The five finalists' ads were put online for a popular vote. The winning ad will not be revealed until it airs during the Super Bowl.
The finalists -- and their entourages, for those who have them -- are being flown to Miami to watch the game from a sports bar facility. Each finalist also received US$10,000.
Joe Herbert, one finalist, said his spot, which features a creative use of duct tape to keep a roommate from stealing the protagonist's Doritos, cost him and his brother Dave "a little bit of money and a lot of sleep."
General Motor Corp's Chevrolet, meanwhile, ran a contest for college students to submit ideas for ads. Five teams were flown to Chevrolet's professional marketing division for an "advertising boot camp" to make their plans into real commercials, Chevy spokesman Travis Parman said.
The students got to see a big-time advertising operation up close, and the car maker got valuable insights into what kinds of messages work with 18 to 25 year olds, the target audience for several Chevy models and a notoriously difficult age group to reach through mainstream media.
To solicit submissions, Chevrolet went to where it thought ambitious marketing students would be hanging out -- ad industry blogs, including www.JaffeJuice.com, www.AdRants.com and MIT's Advertising Lab blog.
At the NFL, the league held a series of events last fall where fans would come in and "pitch" an ad idea to a panel of experts.
The pitches, some 2,000, ranged from "funny to very serious to poignant to wacky," NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said.
Gino Bona, a former sales director at a marketing firm, won with an idea about the loss that fans feel at the end of the pro football season. Professional producers are shooting the ad this week in Los Angeles.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary
THUGGISH BEHAVIOR: Encouraging people to report independence supporters is another intimidation tactic that threatens cross-strait peace, the state department said China setting up an online system for reporting “Taiwanese independence” advocates is an “irresponsible and reprehensible” act, a US government spokesperson said on Friday. “China’s call for private individuals to report on alleged ‘persecution or suppression’ by supposed ‘Taiwan independence henchmen and accomplices’ is irresponsible and reprehensible,” an unnamed US Department of State spokesperson told the Central News Agency in an e-mail. The move is part of Beijing’s “intimidation campaign” against Taiwan and its supporters, and is “threatening free speech around the world, destabilizing the Indo-Pacific region, and deliberately eroding the cross-strait status quo,” the spokesperson said. The Chinese Communist Party’s “threats
RSS