The Super Bowl Ads and Fundraising

Many of my colleagues over here are sports fans. They’ve even gone as far as to investigate what a win on the football field might do for your phone fundraising.

Sunday was sure an exciting game, but I’ll admit it—I watch mainly for the Super Bowl Ads.

The Super Bowl is also the “big show” for advertisers, with some 30 seconds spots costing over $8 million to make, not to mention the most expensive air time of the year. What can we learn from this year’s ads about appealing to donors? Here are a few ideas:

Eliciting a positive emotional response and emphasizing long-term relationships, even when there may be some tough points, are still the keys to a real human connection with supporters. Nissan’s “With Dad” takes us over about 16 years between a father and son in 90 seconds. It’s just a great commercial.

Positive messages and gratitude still carry the day. The Coca-Cola ad continues a long tradition of positive messaging, this time stepping in to counter overall negativity and even bullying in social media. It’s important to recognize that that our job as fundraisers can sometimes be to “Make it Happy.” Make your giving experience all about that “warm glow” for the donor—there’s just too much negativity out there. The simple message that “the world is what we make it” sounds pretty much like a non-profit fundraiser mantra to me.

Nationwide’s ad, featuring the voice of a child who died in an accident, was aimed at prevention, but fell short with most people and the company has had to defend the ad. Good reminder that you want to keep those emotional responses positive. For some donors, there will be a time and place to show dramatic impacts and illustrate potential loss, but your relatively impersonal mass appeals may not be the best channel.

Vintage is still hip. “Real-Life Pac-Man” showed us that even a 30-year old property can be brought to life time and again. Get a response by donors by linking images and traditions from their time on campus to what you’re doing today. Connecting the past to the future helps donor be “Up for Whatever.”

And my favorite, the ad that almost made me drop my hot wings, a reminder that the confusing tech trend of today will be tomorrow’s every day experience, as vintage 1994 Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel can’t understand the Internet and now try to figure out their car built in a factory run by “fan-bines.” The ad and subsequent discussion of the original Gumbel/Couric clip made me think back to the original days of trying to figure out email solicitation, online giving and Facebook alumni pages. You may think crowdfunding and leveraging big data for donors are a foreign language today, but we’ll all be speaking it in a few years.

Chris Hughes shared with me that ESPN reported BMW only has to sell 214 of those i3 cars to cover the gross amount spent on the airtime for Sunday’s ad. Making a big splash may be less expensive than you think.

To check out all the ads, head to the NFL’s page.

And best of luck with your “big game”—the rest of the fiscal year’s fundraising season.

I hope you score at least four touchdowns and avoid any last minute interceptions.