Ameriquest Mortgage Spots Are Winners in Super Bowl Competition

By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: February 9, 2005
NYtimes.com

HERE is a look at some of the highlights, lowlights and sidelights of the commercials that appeared during Super Bowl XXXIX on Sunday, traditionally the biggest day of the year for advertising as well as football.

'QUEST' FOR THE BEST Super Bowl advertisers love to conclude their commercials with surprise endings, because such spots typically perform well in postgame consumer surveys. One marketer, Ameriquest Mortgage, proved to be the dark horse of the night with commercials that surprised from start to finish.

Ameriquest ran two hilarious commercials by the Los Angeles office of DDB Worldwide, owned by the Omnicom Group, which were part of an ad package that included sponsorship of the halftime show. The spots cleverly used everyday events to demonstrate the consequences of jumping to conclusions, intended to underline the campaign's theme: "Don't judge too quickly. We won't." In one commercial, a woman walks in on an accident-prone man cooking her dinner to find what appears to be, but is not, a cat-ricide in the making.

Little was expected of Ameriquest's commercials because the company was a first-time Super Bowl advertiser. Also, Ameriquest had not provided previews of the spots to most reporters before Sunday, leaving anticipation at low levels.

But the dark horse galloped across the finish line in fine form; for example, both commercials landed in the top 10 of the USA Today Ad Meter, coming in at No. 2 and No. 9 out of 55 spots ranked during the game, besting brands with far higher profiles like Pepsi-Cola.

"We were pretty methodical," said Kevin Morefield, executive vice president for strategy and marketing at Ameriquest in Orange, Calif., reviewing reels of old Super Bowl spots and asking consumers "what they want in a Super Bowl ad."

"They told us they like ads they've never seen," he added, "so while it feels good to get free promotion before the event, our surprise would have been spoiled."

MONKEY DO, MONKEY DON'T If Ameriquest was a stealth marketer during the Super Bowl, some advertisers with larger public presences also indulged in stealthy marketing.

For instance, CareerBuilder, a company owned by three major newspaper publishers that operates a job-search Web site (careerbuilder.com), gained enormous publicity for three commercials it ran during the game featuring chimpanzees as dysfunctional office workers.

The campaign, by Cramer-Krasselt in Chicago, also has an element intended to be discovered by computer users on their own: a Web site supposedly put up by the imaginary company for which the chimps work, Yeknom Industries (yeknominc.com).

"Yeknom" is "monkey" reversed.

"We're going after 20-somethings with a viral campaign," said Peter G. Krivkovich, the president and chief executive of Cramer-Krasselt, "and if they spend time on the site, it eventually bounces them back to careerbuilder.com."

One section of yeknominc.com is devoted to a tongue-in-cheek call to boycott careerbuilder.com because of what the mock site decries as a "slanderous television campaign that uses editing tricks and disinformation to make Yeknom Industries the butt of their jokes."

WEARING OF THE (EMERALD) GREEN? Another advertiser, the Emerald of California brand of nuts sold by Diamond of California, is joining CareerBuilder in using the boycott parody in a viral campaign.

Last week, reporters received e-mail messages complaining that a leprechaun named Finnegan O'Reilly had been eliminated from the Emerald Super Bowl spot while three other characters - the Easter bunny, Santa Claus and a unicorn - were kept in.

The e-mail messages directed reporters to a Web site (angryleprechaun.com), supposedly put up by the "International Leprechaun Federation." The elaborate spoof includes advisories against visiting the real Emerald Web site (emeraldnuts.com), which in turn includes on its home page a link bearing the label "Don't go to angryleprechaun.com."

"Our national Super Bowl spot was a first-time event for us, so it was very important we made that media spend work in every way," said Sandra McBride, vice president for marketing at the Emerald unit of Diamond in Stockton, Calif. "We thought a great way to expand our footprint was to explore ways to make the spot live online."

The idea was inspired by the fact that an earlier version of the commercial included the leprechaun, Ms. McBride said, adding: "As much as we loved him, it didn't quite fit in. But we had this great material."

I HATE NY? One moment in the Emerald Super Bowl commercial puzzled some viewers. They wondered why the actor playing a father who misleads his daughter, to avoid sharing his Emerald nuts with her, can be glimpsed wearing under his button-down shirt a T-shirt that reads "New York."

The T-shirt raised some eyebrows because, as Bob Garfield, the ad critic for the trade publication Advertising Age, wrote in a review in this week's issue, the father is presented as a selfish liar.

"There's not any particular meaning to it," said Jeff Goodby, co-chairman and creative director at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, the Omnicom agency that created the Emerald commercial as well as the leprechaun Web site.

The actor may have been wearing the T-shirt, Mr. Goodby said, because at one point there was talk of making the commercial part of an earlier campaign his agency created for Emerald.

That campaign featured silly situations based on phrases that, like "Emerald nuts," begin with the letters "e" and "n," including "Egyptian navigators" and "extreme nurses."

Under that plan, the father was going to represent "exaggerating New Yorkers," Mr. Goodby said, adding: "I don't think there was any reason to pick on New Yorkers. You're really sensitive back there."

IN LINE TO GO ONLINE Many other marketers that bought commercial time during the Super Bowl also sought to gain additional exposure for their pitches by incorporating more transparent Internet elements into their spots.

Many of those efforts paid off, according to data released yesterday by comScore Media Matrix, a division of comScore Networks that measures Web site audiences.

For instance, traffic on Sunday to the Budweiser beer Web site (budweiser.com), generated by commercials bought by Anheuser-Busch, increased 594 percent, comScore Media Matrix reported, compared with the average traffic on the four preceding Sundays. That was also an enormous gain compared with last year, when comScore Media Matrix data showed minimal traffic to budweiser.com during Super Bowl XXXVIII.

Traffic on Sunday to the Cadillac Web site (cadillac.com), generated by a spot for the Cadillac division of General Motors, increased 171 percent, according to comScore Media Matrix, compared with average traffic on the four preceding Sundays. That also was an increase from last year, when cadillac.com traffic rose 94 percent on Super Bowl Sunday, compared with average traffic on the four preceding Sundays in 2004.

Among other Web sites that were found to have marked increases in traffic on Sunday, which are being attributed to their Super Bowl spots, are ameriquestmortage.com, apple.com/itunes, godaddy.com, olympusamerica.com and subway.com.