Sugar Bowl Allstate Mayhem Advertising Campaign

Kelli Brignac

During college football season, my husband and I watched the Allstate Sugar Bowl game between Ohio State (excuse me, THE Ohio State) and Alabama. As an LSU fan, you’ll have to forgive me if I really did not care about it. But I digress. The point is, I watched the game because I’m a fan of college football. And as it turned out, the game was absolutely not the best thing happening in that broadcast. The best thing was a commercial featuring “Mayhem” from Allstate.

I’ve been recording live TV for five years, so I don’t watch nearly as many commercials as I used to. But live sports are one of the places where commercials still reach me. I’m familiar with Mayhem, but Allstate took this series of ads just one step further – from familiarity into awesomeness.

The series depicted Mayhem as a burglar who learned via social media that Matt and Shannon (actually a real couple) were going out of town to the Sugar Bowl game. While they were live-tweeting from the Superdome, Mayhem was selling all their stuff online for really cheap prices.

The first couple of times the commercial ran, I thought it was funny. Then, I logged on to the site and realized I could actually buy things. AND I WANTED THEM. I tried to buy a storage bench I needed for my own house, a TV because it was so cheap and, eventually, laundry detergent just so I could say I got SOMETHING from the Mayhem Sale. (I failed.) Even though the game was technically a “good” one, it seemed a lot more people were tweeting about Mayhem than about the score.

So, was the campaign just a lucky success, or is it something we can replicate? You’ll need to think through a few things.

1.    Your brand has to be familiar.

Allstate has put a lot of money into its marketing over the last several years. Allstate sponsors field goal nets at several colleges, is the title sponsor of the Sugar Bowl and has been running Mayhem commercials for the last couple of years. It’s also one of the largest insurers in the country. People know Allstate. If Allstate runs an ad without once saying “insurance,” most of the people who see it would still get it. Bottom line, if you’re brand new, don’t try to pull off something like this right away.

2.    Know your consumer.

This type of engaging campaign is not for every brand. If you have a very small audience, it may not be worth your money. And if your audience is children younger than 7, they probably aren’t going to be able to make the decision to engage at all. You have to meet your audience where they are.

3.    Think it through.

One reason I failed to purchase anything from the Mayhem Sale was because their website could not handle the traffic. By the second quarter of the game, it would barely load. And in the third quarter, when I finally clicked buy on the laundry detergent, it timed out, and I lost my purchase. Allstate played it off about as well as they could by having Mayhem tweet about how it wouldn’t be fun if the website worked, but it was still frustrating for a lot of people. All the pieces have to work together if you want the whole campaign to be a success.

4.    You might have to spend.

Allstate spent a ton of money on this. I don’t know exactly how much, but between the Sugar Bowl sponsorship, untold minutes of airtime, the replica of Matt and Shannon’s house (yes, they did), the replicas of all their stuff and the website, it added up. Does that mean you can’t pull off something excellent without breaking the bank? No. But that just sends us back to No. 3 – think it through.

5.    You can’t force viral.

No matter how awesome something actually is, there are no guarantees. Just because you spent a ton of money does not mean you’ll get a million hits on your website. Just because the idea was good doesn’t mean other people will love it. Still, a well-planned campaign should produce results. It’s important to decide what you want those results to be when you plan your campaign.

Do you remember?

Thomas Whitehead

Let’s play a quick game. Feel free to grab a pen and paper, open a word doc or just use your head, but take a few minutes and write down or try to recall the biggest news stories of 2013. Yes, 2013, not 2014. Go ahead; I will give you some time. And no cheating!

So, how do you think you did? Did you even come up with 10? Are you sure everything you wrote down was from 2013?

If you want to compare your list to one such list, try this one: http://tinyurl.com/mkyu3xe.

I will admit, when I looked at this list, I forgot most of these events happened just a year – or a little more than a year – ago. Some of them seemed longer than just a year and others seem like yesterday.

This exercise reminded me of a valuable element for communications today: past events are going to mean different things to different audiences now more than ever before.

When I was looking at this list of top news events, I was amazed at the ones that I forgot about completely or ones that didn’t even interest me at the time that they were occurring. Yet, others, I was enthralled with when they were happening.

The biggest takeaway from this for communication professionals is to be very careful when referencing historical events as examples for your messaging. It is critical to make sure that the example is relevant or something that the audience can identify with easily.

This is also true when you consider demographics including age, sex and religion. Different events might have more resonating effects on some people more than others.

As news and information continues to come to us at a lightning-fast pace, it is important to keep up with the significant events of the recent past to determine how people shape messages that they receive by marketers.

The Best Form of Marketing

Kelli Eason Brignac

When I graduated from college, my first job was in the marketing department of a Louisiana-based restaurant company. Part of my job was to work with the general managers to plan and execute various marketing efforts in their areas. But no matter what great events or campaigns we had planned, the cardinal rule in our business was that the operations should never suffer in favor of marketing. Why? Because the best form of marketing is running a solid operation.

That little nugget is not just for restaurants. At Obsidian, we have had clients go “on hold” with us so that they could get their operations in order before coming back ready to grow the business.

Your personal experience                                  

Think about your own personal experience. Let’s say you see a hundred ads for a car dealer offering excellent service and unbeatable prices. You go to the dealership only to find that the salespeople are rude, they will not negotiate below sticker price and it takes them half a day to change your oil despite guaranteeing a 15-minute job. Not only would you ignore the next ad you see about the business, you’re likely to tell your friends and family about your experience, spreading the negative word. On the other hand, if you find a dealer you love, you’re likely to come back and to refer your friends and family.

Are you ready for marketing?

This is not to say that advertising, public relations or other marketing efforts are unnecessary if you run your business well. In fact, they are often imperative to letting potential customers know that your well-run shop is available to them. But if you are ready to market your business, it’s crucial that your operation be able to serve any customers your efforts may bring in – and serve them well! If you do that, you are unlikely to deal with the dreaded negative online review.

What about the second-best form of marketing?

There are lots of ways to market your business once the operations are in place. The second-best form really depends on the type of business you run. Should you use social media, advertising, media relations, direct sales or a mix of various tactics? My recommendation is to hire a professional to help build a strategy that works best for you.