“I’m on vacation,” Innocean USA Executive Creative Director Barney Goldberg said jokingly.
Months have passed since Super Bowl LIV, and the firm’s well-received “Smaht Pahk” ad for the Hyundai Sonata, and this is the calm before the frenzy ramps up again.
“It’s round the clock,” the creative director said. “There’s no rest during the Super Bowl. So once it really gets going, it’s a true team effort because it’s so many people, from strategy, account and media kicking it off, all the way through to social finishing it out. Once you’re done, you’re done. It’s sort of like Santa’s workshop with every elf making it, and then it’s done.
“You take a break and then you look up and it’s Christmas again.”
344 Scripts
That begins with the agency’s media strategists working with the client to see if it makes sense to be in the Super Bowl. It’s a big investment, in addition to a major time commitment.
In the most recent Super Bowl, Innocean clients Hyundai and Genesis both had ad spots. Kia works with David & Goliath, which was acquired by Innocean Worldwide in 2017, for the creative and Innocean for the media, digital, social and experiential.
Around June is when there’s a general sense of what product or service might be played up in the spot and what teams at the agency might work on it. The opportunity is opened up to everyone.
“That’s what makes it exciting is every year it’s a surprise team,” Goldberg said. “We have a lot of talented people, but it’s when you open it up like that, you get surprised by who comes through.”
The agency then goes through rounds and rounds of ideas.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Goldberg said. “So we’ll pace it pretty well and usually you get a few good ideas the first round and then they’ll be beat in the second round.”
Around September is when clients begin seeing those ideas, with hundreds of scripts generated and then whittled down to the best three. The idea is usually sold by October, so that there’s time to find the right directors, talent and shooting location.
In the case of Smaht Pahk, there were 344 original scripts considered, according to news reports.
On the day of the big game, there are listening rooms at the agency and on site at the client’s offices.
And then it’s the nail-biting metrics to actually measure return on investment. Hyundai’s ad placed No. 2 in USA Today’s closely watched ranking of Super Bowl ads, while other metrics placed it as the game’s highest performing commercial.
“The Super Bowl is a big stage for every brand, for every marketer and every agency but it’s not just a popularity contest,” President and CEO Steve Jun said.
“We are working for this campaign and there are a lot of KPIs [key performance indicators] that we promise to our client. There are certain things that we have to deliver, like website traffic and all the leads and PR value and news. We cover every corner and we met every KPI with this year’s Hyundai Super Bowl commercial and our KPI is pretty high.”
“It keeps going higher every year,” said COO Tim Murphy.
Added Jun, maybe partially joking: “They’re scary.”
— Kari Hamanaka
