A Sap for the Olympics
I absolutely love the Olympic season.
Seriously, it harkens back to memories of growing up and sitting around the TV as a family, watching the US teams show the rest of the world our spirit, our competitiveness, and our pride. Happily, that feeling hasn’t changed that much in world moving as fast as the web can carry us. Normally I operate with a fairly high degree of cynisism for this sort of thing, but for these 3 weeks or so, I dunno.
Sure, the feel good advertising and TV spots some of us remember from childhood (like Coke’s “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”) have evolved and are updated to modern sensibilities. Yet, they still evoke those same sentiments about bringing the world together in no other way than the Olympic Games can.
Just like the Super Bowl, the Olympics bring out the best in advertising. But unlike the Super Bowl, where brands are represented through humorous and often irreverent messages (and we LOVE it) the Olympics are more about sappy emotional connections with brands. And as marketers, isn’t that what we are trying to accomplish every day for the brands we represent? An emotional connection. And we LOVE that too.
There are some amazing examples of our craft at its finest:
VISA’s campaign using Morgan Freeman as the VO (love the immediacy of having an ad ready to congratulate Michael Phelps on his 10th Gold Medal, which ran immediately after he won it)
AT&T – the “We” campaign is so well done and subtley patriotic. Love it.
Coca Cola — “The Last 80 Years” – very touching compilation of Olympics and Special Olympics medalists over their many years of sponsorship.
And there are also some big misses, where the brand seems to have been buried in the creative execution:
McDonald’s. Please — Mickey D’s chicken for breakfast? Yeah, I’m sure a lot of Olympians are chomping on these little nuggets of nutrition.
AT&T Mobile — annoying “Beeeeep” campaign needs to stop!
Exxon Mobile – Their commitment to malaria treatment just does not ring true when we all know the insane profits they are making. Couldn’t they just cure malaria with all that money?
All this makes me think there are still good reasons to produce top notch TV spots, even if they exist more strongly now because of YouTube and blogs like this.
The master is still the best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ae3tFI8wXE
What came first, the concept or the song?
The genius:
-It creates an emotional connection with the brand–duh.
-You can watch it 100 times and still a) not get old b) find something new. I can’t say this about the Subway Scrabble Ad.
-They are willing to make an ad that does the heavy lifting and just lets you fall in love with sports/competition–which will benefit all athletic apparel/equipment companies, but they have the balls to let millions fall in love with sports, and knowing that a few million will choose them when the time comes.
Is the horse racing industry listening?
(at the 49 second mark you’ll see a clip Visa is deftly using for their ad campaign–read the dad’s hat)