Hasta La Creative!

Skechers returned to the Super Bowl Sunday with a national ad featuring NFL Hall of Fame player Howie Long. Long highlighted the Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based footwear brand’s wide-fit shoes in a fairly forgettable ad that aired at the end of the first quarter.

“This is what I feel like when I wear regular shoescramped and uncomfortable,” laments Long, squashed between two other passengers on an airplane. After being upgraded, he explains that’s why he wears Skechers’ wide-fit shoes. “It’s like first class for your feet,” he says.

Viewers weren’t super impressed with the 15-second spot. And many wondered how the sneaker brand even had the moneyabout $5 million for a 30-second spot, according to expertsto afford a Super Bowl buy.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Super Bowl LII came down to the last play, so it’s no surprise that the last play sparked the most activity on Twitter and Facebook. Both social networks reported that their highest volumes of conversation during the National Football League’s championship game Sunday night came when New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s Hail Mary pass…

Saatchi & Saatchi New York’s “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign for Super Bowl LII got the stamp of approval from a group of top advertising creatives today, winning the Super Clio, presented by the Clio Awards, honoring the game’s best work. The four Tide spots, which were also chosen by Adweek as the best of…

Blockchain, the underlying technology that powers bitcoin, is one of the buzzwords of the past year. Practically everyone is talking about blockchain, and for good reason. Distributed ledgers, the term of art for blockchain’s underlying technology, offer an exciting new way to transact business without a central authority. Here’s a nontechnical, simplified description of the component parts.

Blockchain defined

A blockchain, or distributed ledger, is a continuously growing list (digital file) of encrypted transactions called “blocks” that are distributed (copied) to a peer-to-peer (P2P) network of computers.

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It’s really nice to be Ad Age right now, because we get to talk about the Super Bowl without focusing much on the game itself. (See, for starters, Ad Age Editor Brian Braiker’s big round-up”Super Bowl Ad Review: We Laughed, We Cried, We Cringed”along with just about everything on the AdAge.com homepage right now.)

Though the rest of the world has, over the years, caught up with Ad Age’s obsession with Super Bowl commercials, the media at largeincluding the entertainment-industrial complex and social mediais still stuck talking about, you know, the Super Bowl.

It hasn’t been easy.

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You want a Super Bowl ad victor? You have plenty of options. Check out Ad Age Editor Brian Braiker’s review of all the ads, or the USA Today Ad Meter results, or, later today, the results of Ad Age’s first Super Bowl ranking by professionals, on both entertainment value but also effectiveness.

Meanwhile, Ad Age has also partnered with iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than seven million smart TVs, to get the big picture on the digital buzz surrounding the ads that aired during the big game. The ranking below gives particular weight to earned online views and social impressions (including mentions and shares). iSpot’s data shows that Super Bowl ads generated more than 84 million views across Facebook and YouTube on game day alone, with the bulk (nearly 51 million) of the unpaid/earned views on YouTube. Engagement with those ads also generated an estimated 805.7 million social impressions on game day.

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Amazon’s “Alexa Loses Her Voice” spot was named most entertaining and best overall among marketing pros surveyed by Morning Consult for Ad Age’s first Super Bowl rankingmeasuring not just entertainment value but brand effectiveness. See full results for every ad below.

In the overall results combining entertainment and effectiveness, “Alexa Loses Her Voice” was followed in the top 5 by Tide’s winking “It’s a Tide Ad,” Tourism Australia’s trick play “Dundee,” the NFL’s “Dirty Dancing” tribute “Touchdown Celebrations to Come” and Budweiser’s water-relief message “Stand by You.”

The top 5 in the individual categories were similar but not identical: In effectiveness, Jeep’s “Anti-Manifesto” bumped the NFL’s “Touchdown Celebrations” from the top 5. Among the top entertainers, Toyota’s Paralympics-themed “Good Odds” displaced “Stand by You.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Shelton, Connecticut-headquartered BIC has selected New York-based Merkley+Partners as its U.S. media agency of record.

BIC spent over $9.8 million on measured media in 2016, according to Kantar Media.

Merkley+Partners will be tasked with media buying and planning in the U.S. across BIC’s lighter, stationary and women’s shaver brands, tasked with handling media across channels with a particular focus on data-based digital and social strategies.

“We are excited to partner with Merkley,” BIC vice president, marketing, North America Ross Ullman said in a statement. “We believe their focus on media efficiency and expertise in digital delivery solutions will have a significant impact on the effectiveness and ROI of our marketing campaigns.”

“BIC is truly an iconic brand that’s been a category leader for over 60 years,” Merkley+Partners CEO Alex Gellert. “We couldn’t be more excited to partner with an organization that has such a storied past and such a bright future.”

The news follows fast food chain White Castle consolidating its creative with account with Merkley+Partners last month, after assigning the agency the retail portion of the account last July.