With 30 second spots being sold for the best part of $3 million, its no wonder Superbowl adverts come under such scrutiny. As over 100 million Americans tuned in to the NFL season’s climax over the weekend, they were treated to the usual smorgasboard of big name, big budget commercials. Below are some of the highlights from the biggest date in the advertising calendar….

1)  Volkswagen, ‘The Force’

The Ad of Superbowl 2011 according to popular consensus, and you can understand why. Oozing cuteness, a teenybopper dressed as Darth Vader attempts to use The Force on a variety of household objects (dog included), but to no avail. Lightly tugging at heart strings, the ad nicely attaches a warm family feel to what is a decidedly uninteresting Volkswagen Pasat.

2)  Motorola, ‘Empower the People’

In 1984, Apple stole the Superbowl show with their now famous advert reimagining Orwell’s 1984. It portrayed the launch of Macintosh as an act of revolution against a tyrannical Big Brother figure determined to retain monopolised power (rather unsubtly symbolising Microsoft’s technological dominance at the time). Last weekend, in Motorola’s knowing recreation of 1984, Apple was Big Brother, ruling the Tablet world . A dry and apt dig at Apple’s dominance - notice the iPod look-a-like headphones blocking the masses from the real world - this ad hits the mark.

3) Chevrolet, ‘Miss Evelyn’

Watching this year’s Superbowl, you’d never have guessed the pains America’s car industry has endured over the last few years. Car adverts dominated the screens, with close to ten separate brands paying top dollar for primetime slots. Yet, as is so often the case with commercials from this industry, a combination of trite “humorous” narratives and generic closeups of bodywork saw most ads fail to inspire. This offering from Chevrolet, however, was a welcome post-modern prick to the car advertising’s overinflated pomposity, tongue firmly in cheek.

It wasn’t all rosy. Here are a couple that failed to sparkle…

• Coca-Cola’s fantastical animation must have cost a fortune, but didn’t really contain that spark to embody their ‘open happiness’ tagline
• GroupOn’s faux-charitable adverts already seem misjudged given the critical reaction from some quarters
• Best Buy’s inclusion of Justin Bieber and Ozzy Osbourne has caused a bit of a stir, but to me seems just a lazy use of celebrities with no obvious brand fit.

The ink is barely dry on Richard Key’s resignation, the colour only just starting to fade from Andy Gray’s blushing cheeks, yet this great little advert featuring women explaining the offside rule is already doing the rounds on the web. Created by McCann London for the charity Kick It Out, the ad seeks to build on the wave of media attention that the Sky Sports presenters’ sexist slip-ups have received in this week’s press. And what better moment to do it? You’d be hard pushed to name a time when sexism in football has dominated so many column inches.

This is viral marketing at its best: relevant, reactive and instantaneous, with a healthy dose of wit.

It sounds like the dream scenario for a brand manager: your brand name has become so dominant in its category that to consumers it is actually synonymous with the very category itself. Children enter a restaurant and order Coke when they really mean cola. Housewives ask supermarket attendants where to find the Kleenex rather than tissues. Dads spend their weekends lamenting the disappearance of their trusty Hoover, even though its a Dyson vacuum cleaner that is sitting gathering dust in a forgotten cupboard.

This phenomenon – a brand name being used as a generic desciption for a wider group of products or services – can be found countless times in marketing history. Sellotape, thermos, yo-yo, escalator: these were all trademarked brand names originally. It was a result of their popularity that they entered common parlance as product names.

Common knowledge would have it that this is a ‘good thing’. The pinnacle of brand leadership. So prolific is your brand in the eyes of consumers, the argument goes, that they see the name of your brand and the name of the product you sell as interchangeable. So dominant are you over the competition that consumers are barely aware that another brand sells the same product. As mentioned before, it sounds like a dream; one that marketeers are all too happy to chase.

Yet very real dangers exist if ‘genericization’ is targeted. For in the long term there exists a tipping point….

Before this point it can be advantageous for the line to be blurred between your brand name and the product you sell if you’re a market leader. Apple have done this to great success, whether consciously or not, with their new product launches. The iPhone has become so prominent that other touch screen telephone handsets are effectively known as lesser iPhones, thereby building the iPhone brand equity. Apple pulled off a similar coup with the iPod: 5 years ago when people asked if you had an iPod, they often just meant ‘do you have an MP3 player?’ At this stage, being identified as ‘category defining’ helps reinforce a leading brand’s prominence and esteem.

The tipping point comes when consumers fail to realise the separation between brand name and product or service name. Google may well be an example of just this. Today, ‘to google’ means ‘to search on an internet search engine’. When people say “I googled x”, they do not necessarily mean they went to google’s website and used their search engine. In fact, it is linguistically perfectly correct to say that you “googled x on Yahoo”, despite Yahoo being a direct competitor of Google. The brand equity Google has built is actually being undermined by becoming a generic search engine verb. There is a term for this – genericide. And it can have legal ramifications: if it is ruled that a brand name has become a widely used name for a particular product, that brand name will no longer have the same strict trademark protection. Think about it: if every search engine could describe their service as googling (just as every producer can describe their see-through tape as sellotape) then all that brand equity created over the years is completely undermined. 

Of course, I’m not suggesting this is going to happen to the whole Google brand: search engines are just one part of Google’s vastly varied offer today. But it is important to remember that brands in the past have all but disappeared for this very reason. Who today knew that YoYo was a brand? Or TippEx, trademarked to Tipp-Ex Gmbh & Co? In this new age of social media there is a whole wave of brand names that are not becoming synonymous with products, but actually forming new verbs: to facebook, to tweet, to skype. It will be fascinating to see how these American brands navigate the peaks and pitfalls of genericization.

‘Trends on the Horizon’ brings you the latest emerging patterns that we’ve spotted in consumer behaviour and asks how they could be relevant for brands.

The last 10 years have seen a phenomenal democratisation of computer gaming. Not only are more computer games being played through more channels than ever before, but the breadth and variety of players is continually widening. According to the Entertainment Software Association, back in 1999 only 9% of Americans over 50 said they played video games. In 2010, that number stands at 26%. Behold, the rise of the Adult Gamer!

Today, adult gaming is no longer the taboo it once was. A quick look at the broad computer game industry provides clear evidence of the adult consumer’s increasing presence… 

• Angry Birds: The iPhone must shoulder part of the blame (or fame) for this emerging trend. Its creation of new informal gaming occasions has helped establish the aura of respectability around grown up gaming. Enter Angry Birds, the commuters best friend. Description: “players have to catapult birds into a series of ever more complex buildings, crushing pigs in hard hats in the process”. Result: 6.5 million copies sold at £2.99. David Cameron has even admitted to being a big fan – the ultimate proof that gaming is now an acceptable adult pastime.
• Nintendo Wii: The Wii’s communications deliberately set out to target a wide demographic: not just the teenage gamer but their mum, dad and grandparents. At first this revolved around depicting families playing the Wii together: adults gaming to interact with loved ones or for the amusement of children. But more recent adverts have portrayed elderly people playing the console alone, most notably Helen Mirren’s recent promotion of Fit Plus. She plays Wii not to have fun with others, but to attain an individual benefit.
• ‘Moral’ Games: The emergence of games with a conscience has complimented the rise of the adult gamer. Take Peace Maker, released in 2007, which challenges players to solve the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Or FreeRice.com, a website which donates 10 grains of rice for every quiz question answered correctly. Often targeted at adults, these games offer an added ethical benefit which compliments (or perhaps provides a suitable facade for) simple entertainment.

What does this trend mean for brands? In its simplest form, there is an opportunity for brands to tap into the adult market from a new angle through creating branded games, iPhone apps being the most obvious way of doing this. The Carling iPint, which forces users to steer a sliding pint through a crowded (and branded) bar before gaining the prize of a ‘drinkable’ virtual pint, is a notable success in this regard.

But there is, perhaps, a more subtle but far richer truth which lies at the heart of adult gaming’s appeal: a willingness to embark on entertaining adventure, however trivial. A brilliant case in point of how this excitement and intrigue can be tapped into by a brand is Red Bull’s recent American stunt. In late 2009 Red Bull hid 9000 cases of its Energy Shots across the US and posted hints online. Thousands participated, solving clues and finding the free drinks. More tangibly for the brand, however, was the impact on social media: within 6 weeks fans of Red Bull’s facebook page had jumped to 1.5 million. After 6 months, that number was 6 million. Its hard to think of many other ways a brand could gain the ear of so many amenable consumers in one fell swoop.

Expect to see more interactive stunts from brands taping into this newfound willingness from adult consumers to ‘play along’, especially with the rise of augmented reality.

When a brand faces a stigma that it can’t shake off, changing its name tends to be a last resort. It is an acceptance that the negative associations attached to the name outweigh any positive equity that has been accumulated in the eyes of consumers over the years, and therefore is actually harming the brand.

If this is true, what can we read into yesterday’s announcement that councillors in Staines, the small Surrey town, have proposed to change the name to ‘Staines-on-Thames’?

The change, it would seem, is designed to distance the town from the single strongest association people have with Staines: Ali G. For those who might not know, Ali G is the hoodie-wearing, illiterate urban ‘Rude Boy’ alter ego of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Shooting to fame in the late nineties, the spoof rapper often talked of his life in Staines. A hit for Channel Four, the comedy didn’t exactly do wonders for the town: Ali G’s Staines was one of gang violence, broken English and teenage pregnancy.

Since then, the town has tried to reboot its image, most notably in January 2009 when it became officially twinned with the tropical island of Mauritius. But the stigma still lingers. Thus the more radical idea of a name change – to finally exorcise the ghost of Ali G, attract new business to the area, and thereby boost investment – appears to be logical. The image of the autumnal Thames – leafy, placid, natural – certainly seems to be the perfect antidote to Ali G’s urban wasteland.

Will the name change be a success? Will it even be approved? The level of residential opposition will ultimately determine this. Indeed some have already termed the move ”pretentious nonsense”. But even if the proposals fail, some of the positive work may already have been done. Yesterday actor Bobby Davro, born in the area, came to Staines’ defense: “its a fantastic town with a great football team, fantastic town centre and lovely pubs”.

Even if the only achievement of the name change discussion is to get these potitive sentiments into the the public domain and national press, then it won’t have been all in vain for Staines’ brand.