University of Iowa business and marketing majors met last night (Sunday) to watch the big sporting event on TV, not so much for the football but for the commercials.
First year M-B-A student Kara Westercamp hosted the gathering of about 20 students and said the consensus was this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads were less-than-super. While there were a few standouts, she says many lacked desperately in several or all of the categories they used to rank them, like creativity, humor, attention-getting and return on investment, or whether you would actually buy the product.
Westercamp says some companies didn’t show their logo until the very end, which made the viewer wonder what the ad was all about and risked not making sense. Several ads were hands-down big winners. Westercamp, a Cedar Rapids native, says the Fed Ex caveman ad ranked tops in all four categories, while the Go-Daddy-dot-com ads, featuring a scantily clad woman, ranked first in the attention-getting category.
It’s the 6th year the U-of-I business students have gathered to watch the Super Bowl’s ads and Westercamp explains their motives. She says it’s the chance to have a field study discussion to put their learning into effect and get feedback from each other about what ads did — and didn’t — work. At two-and-a-half million dollars for a half-minute commercial, Westercamp says the student-viewers thought many of the ad agencies fumbled their expensive ideas.