Watching the great (and not so great) spots on the Super Bowl is always as good as the game itself. Especially with Tivo where you can run them again and again. Which brings us to a question: why do we see so much creativity jammed into this 3-4 hour time period that we don’t see the rest of the year? The companies that did the best job in the Super Bowl had multiple spots that did not rerun over and over (except for the Ford Mustang Fargo send-up which I believe ran three times.) This brings me back to some thoughts I wrote for MediaPost last fall which I am revisiting for you here.

Last fall I saw one of the several new AOL spots again and again on the World Series. The strategy is brilliant. Talk to your customers, find out what’s wrong, then fix it. Next, tell them through a creatively effective campaign using humor that you have fixed the problem, poking fun at your previous problems.

I pointed out to my wife and partner and she said: “excessive frequency due to sponsorship”. She is right of course, and this is all too often the case. Sponsorships seem like a great idea from a media impact standpoint. You can often provide high reach or at least media with high composition of your target audience and achieve frequency within the sponsorship over multiple airings.

A common problem with this strategy is that media and creative seldom collaborate on this. They don’t control the frequency or produce enough creative to justify that frequency. Increasingly, this is a casualty of unbundling and bottom line pressures. The media and creative are often doing great work, but not talking to each other. The result: Not enough spots produced for the short term frequency of airing. This happens over season long sponsorships too. For example, the larger pool of “Want to get away?” spots from Southwest Airlines. Brilliant spots. Good media strategy. But if I see a couple of those again I am going to… Now I do not know if the media and creative are separate for the Southwest business, but if they are really “working together” under the same roof, then there is really no excuse for this.

We’ve known about frequency and wear-out since the work that Levy did for P&G in the late 60’s. There have been many studies since then by individual companies.

Why is this still a problem? It makes one wonder if unbundling has gone too far. In the previous model, at least the media and creative folks were required to meet before the new business meeting. This ensured that they were introduced and heard what each other promised and the client response. It is common in our industry to make fun of the older full service agencies in that they never met outside of these meetings. Sadly, this was and is true far too often, which has been a factor in the rise of the media service agencies.

Let us hope that big media service agencies don’t repeat their errors of the past and build in communication structures for the partner agencies, including creative. After all, the media agencies are now expected to be the glue in the long term strategic relationship. As such, they will be held to a higher standard.

It is time for the priorities of reach and frequency to be balanced on a vehicle level, especially when purchasing sponsorships. Talk to your creative partners. Make sure that your great idea and their great ideas are working together.

You are receiving this newsletter from Mediasmith as part of our efforts to keep our friends abreast of what's going on in media.

If you'd rather not receive this or any other Mediasmith publication in the future, you can unsubscribe by e-mailing us at newsletter@mediasmith.com with the word Unsubscribe in the subject.

If this issue was forwarded to you and you would like to begin receiving a copy of your own, please visit our site - 
http://www.mediasmith.com/contacts/subscribe.html to sign up for these newsletters.