My blog, revisited…

Last week, I wrote about the Super Bowl headache maker known as the Sobe halftime 3-D craptacular. I called out brand guru and director Peter Arnell for his involvement in the unfortunate spot, and left it at that, but upon further investigation, I discovered that he was also responsible for a set of spots that struck me a brilliant over the Super Bowl weekend, and so I figured it was only fair to give credit where credit is due. In fact, I figured it might be wise to revisit some of the things I’ve mentioned earlier, and bring the blog up to speed.

The set of successful spots was for Pepsi, who appropriated the recent Saturday Night Live skit, MacGruber. For those who don’t know, MacGruber is similar to MacGyver, in that he’s supposed to be a genius who gets out of sticky situations using household materials. Every skit has roughly the same premise, placing MacGruber and companions in a locked room with a bomb that’s about to go off and only he can disarm. The problem (and the humor) is that he’s usually preoccupied with something more trivial, such as a mid-life crisis or being hung up on office place gossip, and he never gets around to diffusing the bombs. Well, on the Saturday before the Super Bowl during the SNL broadcast, MacGruber became a bit too preoccupied with Pepsi.


They looked and felt like the SNL skits that came before, but they had one major difference. They were actually commercials. Many viewers might have been fooled a bit by this bit, since SNL has made believable spoof advertisements in the past, and these ads and their placements could have been more of the same.

But on Super Bowl Sunday, another MacGruber (now to be known as “Pepsuber”) was aired.

The fallout wasn’t just exposure for the product in a humorous and memorable ad, but a flock to the internet to find out if the spots shown on SNL were actually skits or a commercial. This is impressive because creating this sort of intrigue generates action on the part of the consumer, and helps invest them in the product. Unlike other Super Bowl commercials that may only be able to point to impressions to justify the cost of the spot, Pepsi could actually measure certain actions, and they didn’t even have to ask directly. It was well done, and for that, I have to give it up to Mr. Arnell and his team. I guess there is a reason he’s a CEO and widely regarded branding genius and I’m… blogging. Also, excellent call in having Richard Dean Anderson reprise his role as McGyver.

Speaking of pretty good ideas, I wrote previously of Warner Music pulling it’s recording artist’s videos from Youtube in an effort to renegotiate profit systems, and how much that can stink for quality musicians like Amanda Palmer who relies so heavily on the net to communicate with her audience. Well, apparently this has been resolved (see the press statement here) in what they call an innovative partnership. Really, it’s not as bad as having the music removed altogether, but it’s still allowing for very heavy restrictions which limit the consumer’s ability to interact and consume the media openly, in hopes of protecting the record label’s interest. But that’s the way it has to be, right?

Well, not exactly. In my blog “Shared music and big results”, I wrote about how the band Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV had managed to rank as the top grossing MP3 album on Amazon for 2008, even though the songs were held under a creative commons license which allowed free sharing and consumption of the music with relatively few restrictions at all. Well, thanks to my friend Steve, I came upon this presentation by Techdirt's Mike Masnick, which is a brilliant summation of how the TRULY innovative marketing and distribution techniques used by Nine Inch Nails might be a preview of where marketing is likely to go in the next few years. Please enjoy.