Harper’s Magazine (February 2011) has the provocative idea of assembling a group of ad execs (today’s Mad Men) and asking them what they would do if the US Government asked them to do an Super Bowl ad that would “make us love our government”.
The resulting conversation and draft ads that are generated tell us more about advertising and capitalism 2.0 than it does about what it would take for us to really love the US Government.
The execs were from top agencies: Grey Group, Wieden+Kennedy, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Saatchi & Saatchi.
The draft ads
Three draft ads were developed. Two of them sidestep the task at hand by dwelling on the theme of what the government doesn’t do, rather than what it does do:
- Goodby, Silverstein & Partners comes up with “Fantasy”, an ad that makes fun of dictatorships in other countries, so as to exalt (by contrast) the political freedom that exists in the US. The implication is: at least we’re not like them!
- Saatchi & Saatchi adopts a similar theme of freedom, by pointing out all the crazy things that are possible in the US. Implication: isn’t it great that we are free?
It is only the draft ad from Wieden+Kennedy for a full half-time show that begins to address the real issue by offering a spoof of Super Bowl advertising, and noting in its concluding line: “This SuperBowl half-time message paid for by the Committee to Improve the Federal Government’s Approval Ratings by Any Means Other Than Actually Improving the Federal Government."
Here we get to the heart of the matter: there’s nothing that you can really do in a Super Bowl ad that can change the way we view the US Government. The money would be better spent in actually trying to improve the underlying substance of government, not wasting it on irrelevant ads.
The discussion included in the article shows that the ad execs are all smart enough to recognize this reality. But if the government is foolish enough to offer them a million dollars to do something foolish, they are willing to oblige and help them spend it: they will take the money and come up with something.
So much for the business ethics of the advertising industry.
The history of money wasted on Super Bowl ads
In the dot-com era of the late 1990s, when many start-up companies had more money than common sense, vast amounts were wasted on enigmatic Super Bowl ads whose point was elusive. Finally, the ad industry got a wake-up call in 2000, when dot-com companies dominated Super Bowl ad time with off-the-wall spots that left viewers scratching their heads about what the ads meant or even what the companies did. The next morning company executives were saying to themselves: “We’ve been giving money to these idiots? They’ve wasted it.”
Much of the responsibility for the storytelling debacle stems from efforts to emulate Apple Computer’s “1984” Super Bowl ad. In January 1984, Apple Computer offered up its vision of George Orwell’s 1984 in a commercial directed by Ridley Scott, the Oscar-nominated director of Gladiator and Alien. Lasting for a full minute—an eon for an ad spot at the time—the visually arresting ad for Macintosh computers depicted a brightly clad woman heaving a sledgehammer through a television screen that was projecting an Orwellian vision of Big Brother to groups of drab worker drones. The ad, which didn’t include one shot of a Macintosh, told viewers that the future need not be like Orwell’s 1984.
The ad was only shown once in the Super-Bowl, and almost didn’t make it at all, owing to reservations on the part of Apple’s board of directors—who were uneasy because it didn’t explicitly advertise the product. It created an immense amount of public discussion and was replayed many times on television stations at no cost to Apple, and it was this, rather than the ad itself, that contributed to a hugely successful launch of the Macintosh.
What emulators of the Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad often fail to see is that there were a number of unusual conditions in place that enabled it to succeed:
• Apple Computer and particularly its rival, IBM, were already well known: the ad satirized IBM and was able to draw on widely held knowledge of the two companies.
• The product in question was also a known quantity—a personal computer: the ad didn’t need to explain what a personal computer was.
• Anger at IBM’s domination and standardization of the corporate PC market was widespread among computer enthusiasts, along with a fondness for the quirky Apple products: the ad was able to play on these preexisting feelings and accentuate them.
• The ad also activated the familiar David and Goliath plot and drew on suppressed feelings of the need for liberation from bureaucratic standardization.
• The ad was timely, being shown in 1984, the year that served as the title of George Orwell’s famous novel.
• The inscrutability in terms of what exactly was going on in the ad was rescued by the subsequent media discussion and endless repetition of the ad: those viewers who missed the point when it was initially shown had it endlessly repeated and explained to them later.
Later on, in the dot-com era, when efforts were made to emulate Apple’s success with Super Bowl ads aimed at introducing unknown companies or unknown products with no preexisting feelings or attitudes in the marketplace, the ads didn’t generate the kind of media discussion and repetition that Apple had enjoyed in 1984: they were simply seen as inscrutable and promptly forgotten.
Today, Budweiser continues with Super Bowl ads that funny people kidding around and having a good time are the kind of people who drink Budweiser beer. The implication is that anyone could be as funny, and have as good a time, if only they also drank Budweiser. The ads appear to be successful in promoting the brand, even though the underlying logic is not exactly rock-solid.
Although in today’s marketplace, the ads can make the sale, the question for the longer term is whether they are building enduring enthusiasm for the brand. At best, the continued strength of a brand based on such evanescent associations will depend on disseminating a never-ending supply of new stories in an effort to perpetuate the “impression” (aka illusion) of Budweiser’s distinctiveness.
Capitalism 3.0 doesn’t need advertising
It is noteworthy that new era companies like Google, Apple (today), or Amazon don’t spend money on Super Bowl ads or even much advertising at all. Instead, they produce products and services that delight customers on their own. The delight that the products and services inspire generate their own word of mouth.
Advertising is an artifact of the age of shareholder capitalism (Capitalism 2.0) in which companies adopt an inside-out perspective and, as Michael Porter recently explained in HBR, doggedly tweak their value chains to generate improved efficiency and then “parse and manufacture demand” to sell the products and services so generated. It is a way of doing business that is producing declining returns and is being replaced by a new age of customer capitalism (Capitalism 3.0). Here the dynamic is outside-in and the whole firm is driven by delighting the client. When the client is delighted, advertising becomes unnecessary.
Improving the Approval of Government means Improving Government
Imagining that advertising could improve the approval rating of the US Government is an application of 20th Century thinking to the issue: it is the thinking that gave us shareholder capitalism or Capitalism 2.0. It is increasingly unproductive in the private sector. It would be a backward step to apply it to the government.
“Government 2.0” has been much talked about as the application of technology to government as we now know it: the use of social media by government agencies, government transparency assisted data APIs, or cloud computing, wikis, crowdsourcing, mobile applications, mashups, developer contests, or all of the other epiphenomena of Web 2.0 as applied to the job of government conventionally defined. As so conceived, Government 2.0 has much in common with Capitalism 2.0. It's grinding out existing services with somewhat better technology.
As properly conceived by Tim O’Reilly, however, improving government is much more than those things. It is a government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and re-imagined as if for the first time and focused on delighting its primary stakeholders. It is government aided and abetted by technology, but technology is a means, not the end. In education, it means “students first”. In health, it means “patients first”. In law, it means “litigants first”. It means shifting the idea of government from shaking the vending machine to get more or better services out of it, and over to the idea of government building frameworks that enable people to build new services of their own.
As this vision is so different from the limited vision of a technology-assisted version of government as we know it, it can usefully be distinguished from that by calling it Government 3.0.
In any event, let’s stop wasting time on Super Bowls ads and get to work on actually fixing the substance of government.
How to fix both government and the private sector
For those who would like to learn more about the history of dying age of Capitalism 2.0 and the future of management (Capitalism 3.0 and Government 3.0), you can read my synthesis of recent books on the subject, The Death—And Reinvention—of Management. Or you can read the books themselves, such as The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, or Reorganize for Resilience by Ranjay Gulati, or The New Capitalist Manifesto
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