Ads and Super Bowl

I did watch the game and saw the Clint Eastwood ad. But this:



is a completely stupid idea. Here is a write up of the "thinking" behind the ad. The shorter version is show a non ad in a very small market and hope that it goes viral. Not, of course, that anyone is going to drink more or less Old Milwaukee because of the ad but rather because

despite its tiny TV audience, the Old Milwaukee ad managed to outperform some of the nationally broadcast Super Bowl commercials in an increasingly important metric of Super Bowl advertising bragging rights: chatter on social-media networks. According to a study by the Boston-based advertising agency Mullen, Ferrell’s Old Milwaukee ad has so far generated 1,640 mentions on Twitter. That’s significantly more buzz than was created by some of the national Super Bowl spots, including ones for Cadillac (which generated 345 Tweets), Century 21 (520 Tweets), Lexus (922 Tweets), CareerBuilder (1,001 tweets), and Hulu (1,191 Tweets).

How many bottles moved? Well obviously we can't know that yet. But surely waiting to see if the ad had the result ads are supposed to have, increased sales, would be the first step toward calling the whole thing "brilliant." No?

Who knows Farrell has been creating small niche ads for Old Milwaukee for a while and maybe they work. Here is one:



And here are some others.

But surely there have to be some kind of numbers for increased sales or not in those markets. Why, you ask, do I bring this up instead of mocking David Brooks' latest insult to the practice of reasoned argument? Simple, I don't think advertising works and this seems a perfect example of it not working. Also, who video tapes the tv show they are watching from a camera?