NFL commissioner Roger Goodell called the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 27-23 win Sunday night over the Arizona Cardinals a “game for the ages.” I enjoyed James Harrison interception and 100-yard return for a touchdown — on the last play of the first half — and the winning TD pass from Ben Roethlisberger to Santonio Holmes with 35 seconds left in the game. But the play I will remember from Super Bowl XLIII is Denny’s Free Grand Slam Breakfast SEO and Social Media million dollar fumble.
Denny’s first ever Super Bowl ads –– developed and produced by San Francisco based, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners –– were compelling and produced buzz as soon as millions of viewers saw them. The spots ask the question “isn’t it time for a serious breakfast?” and promise a free Grand Slam Breakfast on Tuesday Feb. 3 between 6 am and 2 pm.
Google Trends shows the clear spike in searches for “Denny’s Locations”. Hotness = Volcanic. Google News found over 70 different stories on about the Free Grand Slam promotion.
Update: Wall Street also liked the campaign with DENN shares up all day (maybe it was the voice-overs provided by Burt Reynolds).
THE PLAY:
People are hungry. According to a company press release, the campaign is a “multi-media effort and will extend into print, radio, outdoor billboards, Internet, and in-store merchandising.”
Tuesday morning is coming soon, and people want to know where to go for their Free Grand Slams. Denny’s scores in so far as they’ve got the public clamoring for more information and lighting up Google with Denny’s searches:
Denny’s might talk about a multi-media effort but this campaign fell into the laziness of the old advertising paradigm: a one-way message to the consumer. Their lost opportunity was in not spending equal time and effort working on how the consumer is going to reach them.
WHERE DENNY’S FUMBLED
Denny’s has a barely satisfactory Restaurant Locator on their site which is still using an unbearable MapQuest user interface, but at $3 million per 30 second buy, the limited additional funding necessary for appropriate SEO support is invaluable, and dropping that opportunity is an SEO penalty.
WHAT DENNY’S SHOULD HAVE DONE
1. Instead of a national PPC text campaign, Denny’s should have done a simple geo-targeted campaign (even by State) with links to a micro-site where users would find the Denny’s location near them, and for Pete’s sake, get onto Google Maps from MapQuest and make it as easy as possible for the user to interact with your information.
Having geo-targeted ads would provide invaluable data to Denny’s, and a satisfactory user experience as many users complained via Twitter about outages to Dennys.com all night long.
2. Social media listening via Twitter to all of the tweets about looking for Denny’s locations. Have some employees replying to questions and distributing the links to the restaurant finder. If Denny’s had done step one, they would have a bunch of resources to embrace the people that wanted to talk about Denny’s.
3. Plan ahead to leverage their existing online communities (two different Facebook pages with 5,000 and 3,000 fans respectively).
Why did it take Denny’s over 12 hours to get a link of the Super Bowl ad to their Facebook community pages? A proper rollout should post the videos at the same time they hit NBC with links to the restaurant finder and invite the fans to find their closest location (though these fans likely know their favorite Denny’s location already, eh?). Even better, turn the micro-site into a Facebook app that encourages Denny’s fans to invite their Facebook friends to a free breakfast on Tuesday morning, helps them locate where to take advantage, and then allows them to send out invites of their own.
4. Leverage common social tools.
At every point of this social media blitz, allow the user to email or invite friends to visit whatever application, widget, video or Web site they are using. Advertise the locator Web site (or some Web site) on the 30-second spots to extend the reach and longevity of their advertising buys.
I’m glad I saw the “game for the ages” and the entrepreneurial spirit making it’s way back into even the most expensive advertising buys of the year, but the execs behind these ventures need to realize that investing in the SEO and social media is:
• the best way to extend the reach and impact of their budgets
• an excellent way to attract social media communities to their brand in a way that can be leveraged repeatedly at reduced costs in the future
• the only way to capture real data about the impact of the ad campaign as they track activity through the social graphs of these communities
Add your comments below, I need to get ready for my Cincinnati Bengals winning Super Bowl XLIV, in Miami, Feb. 7, 2010. No doubt.
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Tags: marketing, Social Media
Nice post. Good to see the blog up GSI.
Denny’s suffered from a “fragmented” campaign development as they did not follow a strict “direct response path” from their Superbowl ads through all pathways back to their website and physical restaurant locations.
They burned their budget to get people buzzing about the free meal, but obviously do not understand how people today are using social nets, GPS enabed smart phones and Map mashups.
The Superbowl ad-spend would have been better spent on new media team that first mapped out all of the possible paths from the customer touch points back to a geo-targeted store locator and registration form, so they build up an organic social network.
Who was their Ad Agency?
The ad agency probably pushed for the Super Bowl ads to gain the standard “agency” commission. In the new digital realm it is hard for a traditional agency to capture revenue in today’s market.
Today a company can set up a syndication network for Video, Text, Photos, PDFs and other digital data types and build an organic vertical social network for just the cost of the “how to” knowledge. Then feed the network high quality content and you win the game.
Take care, Tim Reha