Besides John Madden’s apparent fetish for “big and strong hands” (murmured at least two dozen times in four quarters) and GoDaddy’s failure to bring anything new to the table (breasts, as usual, but at least they vocalized their business as a domain seller), the 2009 Superbowl commenced in high spirits. A good game of football, with emotions escalating higher and higher to peak, thankfully, in the final two minutes.
When not watching the game, my friends and I chirped out scores for our own commercial advertisement rating game. This year, not much worthy of laughter, sadly. However, one* commercial bear discussion: that of Miller High Life.
* Actually, I’d love to talk about two more commercials. One by Coca-Cola features a neighborhood conducting business as usual while the ad’s cast transform back and forth between real-life and digital-avatar representations of their selves. However, I think it’s clear why the commercial is interesting given the past decade’s conversation about digital environments and identities, so I’ll resist. The second, by Hulu (viewable here), mocks itself while simultaneously advertising the company, but I’ll definitely have to talk about this one soon.
† As another note: Hulu did something interesting. They’re casting all of the Superbowl’s ads online, at their website. The creativity (read: smarts): ads playing before ads, just like all of their other content.
High Life! in One Second
That I remember the commercial and not anything else for the next minute attests to the one-second-long ad’s success.
A bit of chatter had gone around the Web pre-game when bloggers found out about Miller’s plan for creating a new commercial. DFW has a fairly in-depth write-up on their website about how the company calculated the cost of a normal visual ad and decided to downsize both the price and the content. Immediate result: one second’s worth of video for one-thirtieth of the price (thirty seconds being the usual time lapse of a broadcast television commercial). Unpredictable result: Most innovative and successful ad campaign that broadcast television’s seen in a while, if not ever.
The commercial, in which the iconic character of the Miller Delivery Guy faces the camera and firmly declares “High life!,” capitalizes on over a year’s worth of advertising to ingrain the Delivery Guy character into the minds of Americans across the States. The commercial frames the Delivery Guy in front of a stockroom full of Miller beer cases and related merchandise, with a large Miller High Life banner hanging in the background. Immediately, the television viewer recognizes one of two things: either the infamous Delivery Guy in his Miller delivery suit, or the suspended Miller curtain used as a backdrop. While the brain processes the sudden images, Delivery Guy yells out the brand name and the commercial cuts to the following ad.
What was that? flies through football fans’ heads. For the next thirty seconds (I would peg this time frame as a minimum processing speed for the flash-bang ad), viewers piece together the lightning from the thunderhead of Superbowl ads. I would venture a guess that, whatever ad followed Miller’s one-second spot, most viewers did not absorb it. By exploiting the processes of the brain, a one-second commercial paid for itself by a degree of 3000% percent: one second of video, flashing Miller in the viewer’s mind, stayed in said mind for thirty seconds (if not longer) as the mind attempted to process the ad. Because the mind spent the time to process the ad, the minute nature of the advertisement also made a memorable, lasting impression on said mind. Finally, because a one-second ad has probably never been attempted in the history of broadcast commercials, people will talk about this one for a while: additional success, by word of mouth (and, of course, word of mouth is the most successful way to advertise).
View the ad at 1secondad.com. I must congratulate Miller, for their creativity and especially for the novel fiscal tactic. My prediction is that the commercial will not be able to be repeated by another company (viral, meme-able, what have you). Miller jumped in and out, and they took away the trophy this time.