Customer Insight Might Have Helped

Bowing to consumer pressure, Snickers has pulled the "Afterthekiss" website and commercial, and according to the Fon du Lac Reporter "Apologizes to gays" (I guess I will have to wait for my apology.) Yeah, um, Fon du Lac Reporter - it was annoying, if not downright offensive, no matter your sexual orientation.

I don't understand how Snickers got into this mess. Why would TBWA Chiat/Day position them like that? The Super Bowl is a huge deal. It's expensive, there is tons of press attention, lots of people just watching the commercials and only tolerating the football content crammed between ads, and it's the Super Bowl. So did Snickers roll out this concept with no customer insight? Have they identified their prime product consumer as a Neanderthal with a brain injury? How could they be so far removed from their product?

And why did the NFL "play ball" with the concept? If you visited the site before they took it down, you could view NFL players watching the commercial (and grimacing and making comments that will come back to haunt them) and three alternate, but equally horrific endings.

Adrants had an interesting opinion on the effectiveness of the ad, and what the negative long-term impact of the awful manliness concept may be. An insightful quote from the Adrants article:

Somewhere along the line, this industry forgot that Super Bowl ads still need to accomplish what advertising is meant to do: sell. It's perfectly fine for advertising to go for the laugh, the tear, the shudder but it still has to sell or else it's all a pointless waste of money. It's too bad that many in the industry creating ads have forgotten that and have put too much effort into the creation of entertainment at the expense of advertising primary function: to aid in the movement of product from manufacturer to consumer.

And here I thought the Super Bowl was turning into the U.S. National 60 Second Film Festival.

A final thought, which a friend mentioned the next day at work, and someone else posted as a comment on the Adrants post: "Had this ad featured two women, we'd all be drooling over it and loving it. The double standard lives on."

Comments

[Pam Knox]

I think the saddest part of this whole fiasco is that someone obviously DID think they'd captured a customer insight worth exploiting: namely, the homophobia of men 18-24. Look at their statement: "As with all of our Snickers advertising, our goal was to capture the attention of our core Snickers consumer, primarily 18-to-24-year-old adult males," Masterfoods spokesperson Alice Nathanson told the New York Times. "Feedback from our target consumers has been positive, and many media and Web site commentators on this year’s Super Bowl lineup ranked the commercial among this year’s best."

There's not the breath of an apology there, nor any recognition of the hateful subtext in their campaign. Clearly they blame those offended for not appreciating their brand of humor, as they go on to say: "We know that humor is highly subjective and we understand that some consumers have found the commercial offensive."

[Actually, I found the commercial entirely predictable as well as obviously mean-spirited — which makes it even more inexcusable.]

Further, they fail to address a key issue: regardless of customer insight, don't marketers bear some responsibility NOT to appeal to the worst in people?

That's actually a good question for many other broadcasters and government officials out there.