Catenaccio at the Superbowl

The advertising industry is celebrating 50 years of TV commercials. His achievements are undisputed. Many of them are unforgettable. For Publisuisse CEO Martin Schneider, for example, the one in which a hand dips into green washing-up liquid. Palmolive! And my favorite? The Villariba versus Villabajo dishwashing duel. Fairy Ultra! That was in 1992, ten years before Italy won the World Cup title with catenaccio. This is an ultra-defensive style of football with very few offensive actions. Were the makers of this year's Superbowl TV commercials inspired by the catenaccio of the 80s? In principle, yes, if you take serious calls to action via TV commercials as a yardstick for offensive actions. 53% of all 104 (!) spots broadcast during the Superbowl game did not have a call to action. In 2014, the figure was 21 percent. Has the belief in the effectiveness of parallel use been lost? The catenaccio principle applies to TV commercials in general. That is surprising. Equipped with a snack and smartphone (61% said they watched the Super Bowl game with their smartphone in their hand), viewers are more willing than ever to gratefully accept space-opening sugar passes from commercials. Provided you take the trouble to pull out all the stops properly. A few examples.

#Hashtags - 42 percent of Super Bowl spots had a hashtag. So far so good. But the average insertion time was less than a second. Even the fastest tweenagers are unable to pick up a hashtag in this time. Firstly, a hashtag should be displayed throughout the entire commercial and secondly, it should already be known, at least in the core target group. If you want to get yourself talked about via a TV commercial in order to expand your network in social networks, there is no way around the intelligent integration of a hashtag.

#Downloads - Just 8 percent of all commercials with call-to-actions offered viewers an app to download. Anyone who invests over 4 million dollars in 30 seconds of airtime should be able to generate as many leads as possible from contacts via download.

#AugmentedReality - It sounds futuristic. But it's not. We're talking about image and sound recognition applications. Shazam, an app that recognizes pieces of music within a few seconds and displays song titles accordingly on the smartphone, is very popular. There are also numerous applications for image recognition that are currently being used in print-to-mobile. It is actually incomprehensible that not a single Superbowl commercial invited viewers to "listen in" via Shazam.

#Video apps - Videos can be recorded, uploaded and shared ever more quickly and easily in one go via social media apps. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are constantly improving the corresponding functions.

#Chat apps - It has been possible to chat in groups via the Twitter app for a few days now. The leading chat apps are WhatsApp and Snapchat. Using chat apps to bring commercial content into the conversation is an exciting impact option. "For TV advertising to have a future, it has to be good," says Martin Schneider. We take the CEO of the largest TV marketer at his word and look forward to an innovation offensive that really launches the quality match between screens. It is high time for this because Facebook, with over 3 million users, is now challenging TV for the position of the strongest reach medium for advertising.

Beat Hürlimann