The #1 advertising event of the year has passed and we now can pick winners and losers.
An overnight Ad Age survey of several thousand advertising and marketing practitioners ranked the “Alexa Loses Her Voice” ad top, with Tide’s “It’s a Tide Ad” in second. That seems reasonable to me. The Amazon Alexa ad was fun and memorable, not least of all because Jeff Bezos made a personal appearance in it.
I thought the Tide ad especially clever from a purely marketing (as opposed to entertainment) point of view: setting up viewers early on to notice the clean clothes in all ads and associate them with Tide. I felt bad for the creative team of Persil ProClean detergent (which I had never heard of, but Consumer Reports ranks it as the best detergent). Their ad was okay, and kind of clever, but I kept wondering if it was a parody that was going to flip into the real product. It was blown away by the Tide ad; the agency probably had an unpleasant morning call with their client.
The “Dirty Dancing” touchdown celebration spoof featuring Eli Manning and Odell Beckham, Jr. was certainly entertaining – and touchdown celebrations definitely need spoofing — but I don’t know how much it did for the brand.
On the other end of the stick, the RAM Trucks ad featuring the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., was a definite loser. I could not figure out what they were hoping to achieve with that – it had no credibility. You never believed for an instant that King would be promoting Ram Trucks, and then it came out shortly afterwards that in the same sermon King went on to condemn advertising in general, and car and Chrysler ads by name.
