Please stick with me—I swear that Superbowl advertising is relevant to Home Health Care, HME, Infusion Therapy businesses, Private duty Home Care, and other Ankota customers. If you have read this blog before, you may know that I like analogies. They make terrific learning tools and can help reframe a problem with a fresh perspective, often triggering more innovative responses. So take a look at the ads and read on, it might make you think about how you make an impression on your customers and important influencers in your business.

How do you get your customers attention? What makes your prospective clients think of you?

Superbowl ads fascinate me, and it’s not because of the beer, the over the top special effects, or the humor (though I really enjoy the humor!). What fascinates me is the formula that advertisers use to build winning ads. I’ve always been surprised that more attention is not paid to this side of the business, as it provides an excellent opportunity to learn about branding and communication.

How do you formulate a business message and communicate it in such a way that your customers will care about, listen to…or remember?

The Superbowl is the world’s largest stage for advertising. Quite literally, it is the Superbowl of advertising! It attracts the biggest dollars, the most creative people, and potentially, the biggest payoff. A lot can be learned from the mechanics that advertisers and their top-notch agencies employ in creating winning Superbowl advertisements.

Advertising professionals know that creating innovative TV commercials is more effective when using patterns embedded in other innovative commercials. That’s a fancy way for saying “use what has been effective before.” Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures.  Their book, "Cracking the Ad Code," defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them.

Here are the eight tools:
   1. Unification
   2. Activation
   3. Metaphor
   4. Subtraction
   5. Extreme Consequence
   6. Absurd Alternative
   7. Inversion
   8. Extreme Effort

Here are a few ads that I thought were particularly effective…for very different reasons, starting with the VW-Darth Vader ad, above. It was entertaining, cute, and easily related to by most people. Which ones did you like? Or dislike? post the links so we can all see them!

Enjoy!

Chrysler: Imported from Detroit with Eminem. One of my favorites. I am not a fan of Eminem, but there is no arguing his mega star status with an important demographic that the autos need, and he is closely associated with Detroit. Incredibly effective and well done.

(Unification) I can easily recall the ad because of the extreme and amusing nature of the product placement.