Snicker’s Kiss Yanked Off Air
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
Snicker’s Super Bowl ad, created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, which shows two men accidentally “kissing,” certainly got attention and was very popular among many. It ranked #3 in popularity on AOL’s poll, #5 on Adbowl among those under 17 and #9 in the USAtoday poll. However, complaints that the commercial was homophobic from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign led the company to withdraw the spot and the website (afterthekiss.com).
The last time I remember a high-visibility Super Bowl spot being pulled after just a single showing was back in 1997…the infamous “Bob” spot for Holiday Inn was taken off the air after widespread negative reactions. (Personally I thought that spot was perfectly on strategy for what Holiday Inn was trying to communicate at that time.)
But things are different now than they were in 1997. There’s no way the Snickers spot is going away. While it may be officially off the TV air waves, it’s still out there being viewed (and passed around) by millions.
According to a story in the New York Times today:
The Snickers commercial offers a cautionary tale about the echo chamber Super Bowl advertising has become. Years ago, Super Bowl spots pretty much disappeared after the one or two times they were shown during the broadcast. Today, they have afterlives because they are being made available on dozens of Web sites, written about on blogs, forwarded to friends as video clips and even scrutinized for the brain-wave patterns they generate in viewers.
Today it is all about “beyond the :30″. Advertisers seek innovative ways to leverage exposure for maximum value. Especially when that exposure cost $2.6 million for 30 seconds. According to Cymfony, a market influence analytics company, the three advertisers whose Super Bowl spots are being talked about the most are Anheuser-Busch, Doritos and Nationwide Financial — all three surrounded and supplemented their Super Bowl commercials with elaborate Web-based campaigns. Beyond the initial exposure, millions more impressions have been garnered on sites that are streaming the spots and/or have polls like AOL, iFilm, Adbowl, USAtoday, and of course YouTube. Reprise even put together a scorecard of how well each company did in terms of integrating their efforts between TV and the web. Snickers actually scored among the highest on that front along with others like Blockbuster, GoDaddy.com, CareerBuilder.com and SalesGenie.com.
Will the “kiss” spot negatively impact sales? And do we give the :30 spot way too much credit? Guess we have to wait and see. Damn near every woman hated those stupid GoDaddy spots last year that were all about T&A, but they seem to be doing well as a business (well enough to run another stupid spot this year). The SalesGenie.com spot with the cheesy sales guy was voted the worst spot in the USAtoday poll, but who had heard of them before the SuperBowl?