4 Lessons Learned from this Year’s Super Bowl Ads
Love ‘em or hate ‘em (much like your favorite football team or the rival team you despise) Super Bowl Ads are a perennial barometer of our nation’s collective zeitgeist. Since a single 30-second ad placement can cost five million dollars, you can bet there’s a lot of valuable marketing brainpower behind each one. Sure, there are always a couple epic fails (looking at you, car commercial that was actually about a man choking on a cashew), but for the most part, these ads are a pretty decent reflection of what America’s thinking, watching, and of course, buying.
So what takeaways from this year’s battle of the brands can you use in your own TruScribe videos?
1. Nostalgia is always relevant.
We saw the Backstreet Boys crooning “I want it that way” about Flamin’ Hot Nacho Doritos. The Dude from Big Lebowski casually switched up his legendary drink order in favor of Stella Artois (alongside a Carrie Bradshaw cameo). Campy horror film “I Know What You Did Last Summer” somehow factored into a sales pitch for Olay. The message was pretty clear: if you were hip to pop culture in the 90s, you’re probably sitting on your couch watching the Super Bowl and thinking about what to eat, drink, or put on your face today.
Whiteboard video lesson? Don’t be afraid to stick with what’s iconic. The stop sign. The dollar sign. The play button. Icons are icons because they are simple, memorable, and impactful. (Much like The Dude, they abide).
2. Molds were made to be broken.
Zoe Kravitz whispered her way through the world’s first ASMR commercial; dreamed up by Michelob Ultra to target a super-specific audience, it also got plenty of people talking (and Googling Auto Sensory Meridian Response). T-Mobile steered away from traditional video by showing us a string of texts instead. Burger King rolled vintage footage of Andy Warhol eating a Whopper with a simple hashtag that was as wacky as it was intriguing.
What can you apply to your whiteboard video? You can always go beyond the whiteboard with TruScribe. We can draw over a live action video. We can annotate your actual website with meaningful drawings. We can turn your whiteboard video into a multimedia presentation. (Also, if you liked that T-Mobile ad, you should know we’ve created some pretty cool text videos. They’re actually aligned with our Scribology principles. Element of surprise, and all that.) If you love working with us but you just want your video to look different from time to time, all you need to do is ask! Also, hashtags. People love those.
3. People are compelled by imaginative stories.
It was universally acknowledged that Amazon had the most successful Super Bowl commercial. Not only did that ad take a basic yet thought-provoking premise (ideas for Alexa that didn’t make the cut) and put some serious star power behind it (Harrison Ford, Forest Whitaker, and the ladies from Broad City), it had all of us wondering what a dog would order from Amazon, should it have the power.
How to work this into your next whiteboard animation video? You already know that telling your story gets results. But put some imagination into it. What if your HR department could be illustrated as a flock of birds? Could you stretch a Star Wars metaphor across a video about investment plans? Trust us, you can. (Well, we can. We’ll help you.)
4. When in doubt, cross over.
Taco Bell and T-Mobile. Stella Artois and Dos Equis. Amazon Echo and Pringles. And of course, the surprisingly effective collab between Bud Light and Game of Thrones. There were a lot of co-promotions in this year’s Super Bowl Ads, especially for those of us watching closely.
When can you use this idea with a whiteboard video? Don’t just post a video on a website and tell people to watch it. Tie it into something people are already experiencing, like a company meeting, a PowerPoint presentation, or even an email. Or talk to us about creating other assets from your video. A poster for your breakroom- an infographic- a helpful handout. There’s a stuffed squirrel named Zippy that exists as a TruScribe video artifact. You have options!
Whether your team won or lost Super Bowl LII, if you’re thinking about ways to win at video, let’s huddle up!
- Published in Creativity, Whiteboard Animation Video
Content Marketing World 2016: The KICKOFF
Cleveland, You Rock!
The TruScribe crew is in Cleveland, Ohio for Content Marketing World and we’re ready to rock and roll with our content marketing solutions. We’re looking forward to Wednesday’s sessions on everything from “Content Repurposing on Steroids” by Arnie Kuenn to “Survival Skills for Enterprise Content Strategists” by Lisa Welchman and more. With CMW’s impressive list of speakers, it’s guaranteed to be a productive content-learning extravaganza.
When the floor opens tomorrow, we invite you to stop by Booth #7 and meet the TruScribe team. We’re friendly, great conversationalists, even better listeners, and have a passion for content solutions. And you’ll find out how our fully-produced whiteboard videos make content quickly engaging and well remembered. Not to mention, we have some pretty cool TruScribe whiteboard markers you may want to check out — because who doesn’t love a good marker?
See you at Content Marketing World!
- Published in Events
Video Scribing Sets Messages Free: Audiences Processing Your Message?
In this third installment of our “5 Strings” series of blog posts, we’re going to cover another common cause of trapped messaging. But rather than simply state the issue that’s at the base of this string, I’m going to illustrate the problem with an example…
Think back to the worst PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever had to sit through. I’m talking about drab slides, poorly-chosen animations and – worst of all – slide after slide of dry, boring bullet points. Remember exactly how it felt to sit and listen to the speaker’s monotone, trying to keep your feet from fidgeting and your fingers from straying to your smartphone.
If you think that there’s got to be a better way to convey your company’s message, you’re absolutely right!
Tell a Story
Too often, your message becomes tangled up in a format that’s hard for audiences to process. Although it’s certainly important to convey information about your competitive advantage and the specific benefits and features your product offers, detailing your value proposition through slide after slide of buzzwords and bullet points isn’t doing your message any favors.
So what’s the solution? If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you won’t be surprised to hear that the process of sharing information in story format is a much more engaging alternative.
Our brains are conditioned to hone in on stories, which means that your listeners will be better able to process and understand your company’s message if it resembles this type of pattern.
Now, I’m not saying that you need to start out every sales presentation using a tacky, “Meet Bob” approach. While that might work in some situations, corporate or B2B sales isn’t usually one of them. Instead, you’ll want to capture some of the elements that make storytelling so effective in your business presentations in order to set your message free.
Here’s how to do it:
Focus on the relationships between ideas and how these ideas impact your listeners. Doing so gives listeners the impression that they’re hearing an engaging and compelling story without any cutesy gimmicks.
Break your content up into easily digestible chunks. Think about books, which are structured by chapters and then broken down even further by paragraphs. This implicit hierarchy gives the brain a break and allows it to process information at its own pace – making it much more likely that your message will be retained by listeners.
Tailor your story to your clients’ experiences. Stop focusing so closely on what your product can do and use your sales presentation to actually show clients how you can heal what’s ailing them!
Transforming your Message
Obviously, if you’re working with traditional presentation methods, your ability to create engaging, story-style sales pitches will be limited. That’s one of the reasons we’re so passionate about the potential whiteboard scribing videos hold for sales message delivery.
Using our Scribology video format, we’re able to transform your dated, bullet point-riddled PowerPoint slides into compelling videos that make use of simple images, refined colors and focused framing in order to un-trap your message and deliver your corporate story in a way your audience can process and enjoy. To find out more, give us a call at 888.684.4944 to get started with the TruScribe process today!
- Published in Video Marketing, Whiteboard Animation Video