Campbell Mithun's Playbook for the Ad Bowl

Ten days and counting until Super Bowl XLIII, and Minneapolis ad agency Campbell Mithun and its client H&R Block settled just hours ago on which of three newly produced ads they’ll air during the game.

CEO Steve Wehrenberg says his agency has never put more than one concept into production for the Super Bowl spots it’s created for Block in other years (see facing page). But this year is different—there’ll be opportunities to use all three spots. Likewise, Super Bowl advertising is different from regular television advertising, Wehrenberg says.

“Where with a typical TV commercial we might look at, let’s say, half a dozen concepts and then decide which two or three we want to recommend [to the client], for a Super Bowl commercial we probably will look at 50 or maybe even 100,” Wehrenberg says. “We’ve had just about everybody in our creative department working on concepts.”

Very simple concepts. The Super Bowl audience is a huge opportunity—40-some million households in recent years—but it’s also diverse, watching the game in distracted groups at parties, and expecting to be entertained more than informed.

“When we’re working on a Super Bowl ad, the creative brief for the strategy—for the message and what you’re trying to do—is simplified quite a bit,” Wehrenberg says. “A lot of advertising, especially television advertising, has complicated messages, and conceptually you don’t have time to reward the viewer with an interesting fun or funny concept because you’re trying to convey so much information” during a standard 15-second spot. By contrast, Super Bowl ads run 30 or 60 seconds long, and this year they sold for a new record high of nearly $3 million for a 30-second slot.

At that rate, television ads have to be hard working. But for the Super Bowl, there’s “a different definition of what ‘hard working’ means,” says Jonathan Hoffman, Campbell Mithun’s president and chief creative officer. Rather than measuring effectiveness in terms of delivering lots of news or information, “here, it’s almost turned upside down; the real effectiveness is breaking through in an entertainment, pop-culture sort of way.”

Even so, “news” was why H&R Block ponied up for a 30-second ad during this year’s game. It had a new service to promote: its Second-Look Review of a customer’s past tax returns. Block claims it can usually find mistakes in a customer’s favor, reaping that person additional refund or credit dollars. This year’s Super Bowl Sunday also happened to lead into what is historically Block’s biggest week of business during the year, making the game an optimal time to advertise. Without factors like those to justify the expense, the tax-preparation firm has stayed on the sidelines for the past four Super Bowls.