Shop Talk

Check Out Line: PepsiCo offers up to $5 million for amateur Super Bowl ads

Check out how you can earn $1 million by wearing an electric dog collar.

Okay, not exactly. That was the punch line of a successful amateur ad this year created for PepsiCo’s Super Bowl commercial contest, which the food and beverage company is running again for the 2011 Super Bowl with a prize pool of up to $5 million.

Makers of the best ads for zero-calorie Pepsi Max soda and Doritos chips can win $1 million for an ad that scores No. 1 on a USA Today ad poll, $600,000 for No. 2 and $400,000 for the third spot. A sweep of all three spots earns a $1 million bonus for each winner.

Pepsi ran four ads during the 2010 Super Bowl. A 30-second spot during the National Football League championship game tends to run about $3 million. That electric-collar ad — in which a man winds up with the collar around his neck while the dog makes off with his bag of Doritos — was ranked one of the best of the Super Bowl in many post-game surveys.

You could put up with getting shocked a few times for that, right?

Also in the basket:

World Cup is no March Madness in sapping productivity

It may be the World Cup, but when it comes to sapping productivity in the United States the global soccer tournament still has a thing or two to learn from March Madness and the National Football League.

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which often measures lost workplace productivity, said many U.S. fans will tune in for the quadrennial soccer tournament, which kicks off Friday in South Africa, but the event still trails the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, dubbed March Madness, and other events.

“Soccer simply has not caught on with the majority of American sports fans, Challenger CEO John Challenger said in a statement.

“However, the World Cup is a unique event and could attract a lot of viewers who might not typically go out of the way to watch a match,” he added. “Even as the sport grows in popularity, though, it will have far less of an impact on workplace productivity than the March Madness basketball tournament, for example.”

In Challenger’s nonscientific, nonbinding ranking of sporting events with the most potential to affect workplace productivity, the World Cup ranked No. 4:

No. 1 — NCAA men’s basketball tournament (aka March Madness): Widespread office tournament pools and the fact that about half of the first 32 games are played during working hours makes this “the granddaddy of productivity sappers,” the Challenger firm said. Proof of that was the use of the ”Boss Button,” which instantly hides the webcast behind a fake spreadsheet, 3.3 million times this year.

No. 2 — NFL fantasy football: Millions of fantasy football participants  manage their teams from their office. Talk about drafts and trades adds up over the 17-week season, the firms said.

Unicorn + Clown = Surprise hit for Walmart

If the NFL playoff games weren’t filled with enough unexpected action to keep you awake this past Sunday, something else was — a screaming clown.

Walmart aired a new commercial during the games this weekend meant to promote its low prices on party supplies.

Good timing, considering millions of Americans are getting ready to host parties for the Feb. 7 Super Bowl game.

The Walmart ad, which features a misplaced unicorn and a screaming clown, has taken on a life of its own online. It now ranks as the No. 5 on the Viral Video Chart. It’s quite a change from a few years ago, when the most action in a Walmart ad was an animated yellow happy face racing around its stores, slashing prices.

Take a look and tell us what you think:

Walmart clown commercial on YouTube

from MediaFile:

No Super Bowl blues; expect big TV ratings

The U.S. economy might be weak, but the Super Bowl still scores with consumers.

The CBS broadcast of the National Football League's championship game on Feb. 7 between the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints should draw strong TV ratings, possibly challenging viewer levels not seen since the late 1990s.

"We're looking at a big rating," said Neal Pilson, former CBS Sports president and head of his own sports consulting firm. "The fact that the two conference championships got better than usual ratings usually indicates that there's a lot of public interest."

The NFC Championship game between New Orleans and the Minnesota Vikings drew 57.9 million viewers, ranking it as the most watched conference championship game since the 1981 contest between Dallas and San Francisco that featured "The Catch." It was also the most heavily watched TV program, excluding Super Bowls, since the 1998 "Seinfeld" finale.

Meanwhile, the AFC final between Indianapolis and the New York Jets drew 46.9 million viewers, ranking it as the most watched AFC Championship in 24 years.

While a Super Bowl with popular Vikings quarterback Brett Favre might have scored a higher rating than the current matchup, the Saints are an exciting team that received a lot of exposure in the championship, Pilson said. It also helps that it's the first NFL championship to feature both conferences' No. 1 seeds since January 1994, when Dallas played Buffalo.

If the game remains close into the fourth quarter, he expects a rating of 43.0 or better. A ratings point is a percentage of U.S. television households that watched the game.

Happy Super Valenbowl!

Target spent time talking to Wall Street analysts on Thursday, outlining the multiple ways it will expand its business in the next 10 years.

It will open smaller stores in urban markets. It will add its PFresh food concept into hundreds of stores, boosting customer traffic. It will explore overseas expansion in Canada, Mexico or Latin America.

And it will celebrate the Super Valenbowl!

Michael Francis, Target’s chief marketing officer, said the retailer is ready to reclaim seasonal events in a “bolder and more dominant way.”

It did that during the busy Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend. It held a two-day sales event — online on Thanksgiving day and in stores on Friday — that it said resulted in a double-digit rise in Black Friday traffic compared with last year.

Next up is Valentine’s Day. But Francis said cupid’s day is now having to compete with the Super Bowl, which will be played on Feb. 7 this year.

So what to do? How about combine the two!

Auto show-Super Bowl TV ads don’t score for Mazda

Advertising during the Super Bowl doesn’t score for Mazda.

While the Japanese automaker plans to boost its marketing budget this year as it launches the Mazda 2 small car, running TV ads during the National Football League’s championship game in February won’t happen.

“You’re never going to see us on Super Bowl,” Mazda North American chief Jim O’Sullivan said at the Detroit auto show. “We’re not going to spend that kind of money on that kind of property because, yeah, you get a lot of impressions and stuff out there, but the fact of the matter is, do you really get to the target you really wanted? That’s more of a feel-good ad for a lot of people.”

O’Sullivan said it was a “given” that Mazda’s media budget will be up in the first quarter, as well as for the year, although he didn’t say by how much. He said Mazda, which expects its U.S. sales to possibly rise faster than the overall market this year, will spend more on social media and digital advertising this year as it tries to reach younger buyers for its late summer launch of the new 2 model.

However, O’Sullivan said advertising on the Super Bowl — where Korean automakers Hyundai and Kia, and Germany’s Volkswagen will advertise this year — is more about the creativity of the spots than the product or service being sold.

“The one thing about the Super Bowl too, if you’re going to go and do ads at the Super Bowl, you better make sure you got some very good creative because you’ll get criticized for your ads if you don’t have very strong creative,” he said. “So is it about selling cars or is this an agency’s competition? They’re memorable in some cases, but that’s a very expensive property.”

“I’d rather take those resources and go where our customers are and focus on what our brand is,” O’Sullivan added.