Google Takes Top Spot in Kellogg's Super Bowl Ad Review

While a good deal of the water cooler talk today will be about the historic first Super Bowl win by the New Orleans Saints on Sunday, many of us will also be talking about the Super Bowl ads: which ones we liked, which ones we didn't get or which ones simply left us cold.

The ads were an especially important part of the game for about 40 Kellogg School of Management students who participated in the 6th annual Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review.

According to the students, the best three ads belonged to Google, Audi and Denny's. In the bottom three were ads by the U.S. Census, Focus on the Family and Honda.

I spoke briefly Sunday evening with Kellogg professor Derek D. Rucker, who said that the common factors shared by the best commercials were superior branding and positioning, as well as linking the ads to the product. The Denny's chicken ads also stood out because of their thematic grouping.
"The second one reinforced the first, and by the last one you knew immediately that you were watching a Denny's ad," Rucker says.

The ads that ranked the poorest were not attention grabbers, nor did they present a strong position. Despite the controversy surrounding the Focus on the Family spot, Rucker said the ad actually played it very safe.

"The message was so soft and subtle. There wasn't a strong call to action," Rucker said of the ad's invitation to go online and learn more about Tim Tebow's story. "They didn't really show a plan or give direction."

Rucker said that using the strategic academic framework called ADPLAN (attention, distinction, positioning, linkage, amplification and net equity) allowed students to come to a consensus on the top and bottom ads fairly easy. Did their top three make your list of favorites? And which spots did you think were the biggest disappointments?

Image courtesy of Google.