Introduction
For this project, I took a look at a couple of commercials from the 2019 Super Bowl. The Super Bowl is the single biggest ad spend in America each year, and most companies create special ads just for the event, many of which will not be shown again. Thus, the approach to messaging and creative is a little bit different, but given the amount of money in play, it is well worth analyzing these ads for perceived effectiveness.

Ad #1

The first ad is for M&Ms, where they introduce a new product, a bar with M&Ms embedded inside. The ad features a woman driving in a minivan, and adult voices (the M&Ms) coming from the back. The voices are saying things kids might say if they were fighting or becoming unruly. The “mother” eventually stops the vehicle, turns around and threatens to come back there, and then there’s a shot revealing that it was M&Ms doing the arguing, because they are stuck together in one bar. Then a voiceover announces the new product.

The woman is clearly intended to be a “mother” based on her age, the minivan and her behavior, including turning around to yell at the unruly “kids”. Most of the sounds are the M&Ms arguing. They are the typical voices from other M&M ads, so they don’t actually sound like children. This leads the viewer to realize immediately that whatever is in the back is not children, but something else. The shot at the end with the reveal is therefore informative, somewhat anticlimactic, but at the same time you never know until that shot what exactly the voices are.

A premise in an advertisement is a major claim around which the ad is structured (White, 2016). The hidden premise here is that snack food companies that make funny ads also make fun snacks. This premise is evident is the lack of any sort of an argument in the ad; it appears to be funny for the sake of being funny. Further, the product reveal at the end is a fairly goofy product – maybe it’s fun but it doesn’t appear to have any real value proposition beyond that. The minor premises in this ad are that the ad is funny because it conveys a relatable situation, and that M&Ms are fine because the anthropomorphic M&Ms are lively and goofy, and the product itself is a whacky take on an M&M snack.

This particular ad doesn’t seem to make any serious claims. A claim would be some sort of value proposition that the product has. There might be an implied claim that the new product is fun, or a good snack, but the ad does not expend any real energy trying to convey that claim. It mostly exists just to be funny, and to alert the consumer to the existence of a product extension. For an ad to be effective, it should ideally make a claim that matters to the target audience. The only message that is being sent to the target audience here is that the company is trying to relate to them. If that is effective, there’s still not much of a sales pitch, and the company is relying on the humor of the ad to sell the product, without making further claims.

All told, I do not find this ad to be particularly effective. There are a lot of snack and fast food companies marketing their products using humor to entertain, and then mention the product at the end. The hope, theoretically, is that the product mention will keep it top of mind when shopping. What I see with this ad is that there’s...…argument in its favor, and plants the idea that the person needs to start thinking about an Audi.

Conclusions

For an ad to be effective, it should have a premise, and claims, but also a structure that makes those clear and conveys them in an entertaining manner. This is especially true during the Super Bowl. There are a lot of distractions, but a lot of people also watch specifically for the ads. When an ad supports the brand positioning, and conveys the message effectively, something that the Audi ad does, it should have a position impact on brand associations and purchase intention. That Audi specifically wants the audience to think a certain way about its vehicles regardless of whether or not they can afford one is another interesting aspect of the ad, one that I feel was quite effective.

The M&M ad is less effective. It has a fairly weak premise, and does not make many claims. What messaging it does contain is a loose association between a fun ad and a fun product, but that’s neither original nor actually speaking too much to the product’s value props. Further, for a new product introduction ad, it doesn’t really do anything to sell the new product, and takes way too long to get to the point. The product introduction is the punchline of the ad, but there’s not much to grab the viewer’s attention to get to that point. For those reasons, I found the M&M ad to be ineffective. To make this more effective, the ad would want to spend a little less time on the silliness in the mid-section of the ad and get straight to explaining why the viewer needs to care about this new product. A little bit of that messaging would go a long way to improving the effectiveness of this ad.…