Mario So Funny

INDIANAPOLIS — Chrysler beat Danica Patrick to capture the nation’s attention in Indianapolis Sunday night with its Clint Eastwood “It’s Halftime in America” advertisement during the 2012 Super Bowl.

Industry experts said Patrick’s body painting GoDaddy Super Bowl ad stalled compared with Chrysler, which generated the biggest buzz during the nation’s most important advertising venue.

Nearly 34,000 people used social networking site Twitter to talk positively about Chrysler during the Super Bowl, according to Mullen, a Boston-based ad agency that helps run BrandBowl 2012, an advertising review that tracks real-time traffic on Twitter during the game. Chrysler placed 3rd overall, behind Doritos and an H&M ad showing a scantily clad David Beckham.

GoDaddy, which had two ads, including the body painting one co-starring Patrick with fitness guru Jillian Michaels, had the highest number of negative tweets, Mullen said, followed by Cars.com and Lexus, whose first Super Bowl ad ever showed the redesigned 2013 GS breaking out of a metal box in a sci-fi lab.

Chrysler’s Eastwood ad was the overall favorite of Luke Sullivan, author of “Hey Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Advertising,” chair of the advertising department at Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia and a blogger who chatted live about the commercials during the game on The Wall Street Journal‘s Web site and declared it his top pick.

It is important to stand out. Super Bowl XLVI had 22 car-related national ads, which used up nearly a third of the 70 available 30-second ad slots, priced at about $3.5 million each. The staggering figures have some observers calling the Super Bowl a new auto show.

Chrysler’s two-minute ad moved beyond automobiles, with Eastwood giving a national pep talk that used the Motor City’s comeback as a metaphor for the nation. Many viewers confessed on Twitter, Facebook and talk radio that it moved them to tears.

The bar was high. Chrysler scored big last year with the Eminem/Chrysler 200 ad that introduced the “Imported from Detroit” concept. This year’s ad, however, didn’t seem to match the sensation sparked last year.

Not every expert was wowed with Chrysler’s attempt.

“If you had told me it was paid for by the city of Detroit or all of the Big Three together, I would have believed that, but in terms of benefitting the Chrysler brand specifically, I don’t think it did,” Kenneth C. Wilbur, a marketing professor at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, told Inside Line after the game.

Wilbur believes for an ad to be truly effective, the brand has to tap into the emotions and make a connection with its target audience.

One auto ad that did make such a connection was Acura, he said. New to the Super Bowl this year, the brand threw a touchdown with its NSX ad featuring Jerry Seinfeld, the Soup Nazi and Jay Leno. While it might not have reached the peak of the “ads we like” polls — it finished in the middle of USA Today‘s Ad Meter panel — the spot will help move the metal, Wilbur said.

Another standout, he believes, was Honda’s CR-V Ferris Bueller movie spoof ad, which resonated with the appropriate consumer segment. The adults who came of age during the late 1980s, when the movie was released, are now the demographic for that vehicle, he said.

Furthermore, both ads benefitted from having million of views prior to the game, since the automakers posted them online, he said. Chrysler’s buzz came during and after the game.

The payoffs for releasing Super Bowl ads early are big, Wilbur said. Automakers that pre-released ads generated the most social-media chatter among Super Bowl advertisers, according to YouGov BrandIndex, a daily consumer research service on brands.

Topping their favorites even before kickoff was Volkswagen, with its overweight dog/Beetle ad, a follow-up to last year’s likable mini Darth Vader spot, as well as General Motors, Acura and Audi’s “Vampire Party.” These spots won over adults 18 years and older, according to the YouGov BrandIndex survey, which interviews 5,000 people each weekday from a representative U.S. population sample. Respondents are drawn from an online panel of more than 1.5 million individuals.

Ford made news for the second straight year by being absent from the big show except when it was referenced in Chevrolet’s Silverado apocalypse ad. Ford asked GM to pull the reference before the ad ran during the game. Chevy said it was “good humored” and ran it anyway.

Ford’s absence was “a mistake,” said Michigan State University’s Robert Kolt, an instructor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing. “I think they probably made a mistake because if you want to play with the big dogs, you’ve got to be in the game,” he told Inside Line late Sunday.

Kolt hosted 23 MSU professors at his home to rate the ads, a 15-year tradition. The top performing auto ad in their minds was Fiat’s 500 Abarth ad featuring an Italian-speaking woman (played by Romanian supermodel Catrinel Menghia) and a provocative drop of latte foam. Even though it first debuted at the Los Angeles auto show in November, it came in fifth place in the Super Bowl, behind Skechers raising dogs, naked M&Ms, Elton John’s Pepsi and the slingshot Doritos baby. The only other auto ad that wowed them was the VW Beetle ad, which placed 8th.

The MSU panel, which admits to having a bit of a bias for Cadillac since there is a Cadillac assembly plant based in nearby Lansing, was disappointed with the “Green Hell” entry showing the new 2013 ATS. “We normally rate them higher,” Kolt said. “It was a good ad, but there was a lot of competition that turned out to be better.”

The game is a chance for the auto industry to pitch more than 100 million viewers. Last year, the Super Bowl attracted 111 million viewers, the biggest American TV audience in history. Those records likely were broken because this year’s contest marked the first time that any Super Bowl game was streamed live online, giving it a worldwide audience as well.

According to a Nielsen poll, 51 percent of viewers last year tuned in for the commercials rather than the game itself. Furthermore, viewers are paying attention to brands. Nielsen said brand awareness for commercials airing during last year’s Super Bowl was up to 275 percent higher than awareness for the same creative during regular programming.

“The auto sector did better than I expected this year,” Kolt said. “It would be rare to get that breakthrough ad like the Chrysler ‘Imported from Detroit’ spot, so last year was really unique, but that Fiat spot was attractive to both men and women. Still, it’s really hard to beat naked M&Ms and Elton John in platforms.”

Inside Line says: The auto industry gets another MVP for Super Bowl advertising efforts.