Journalism 201
Blog Project #1
Professor Priewe
It’s A Tide Ad
Description
During the 2018 Super Bowl there were quite a few great commercials that stuck with the audience. There were beer commercials, car commercials and of course commercials about Amazon’s ALEXA. But among all of those great commercials there was one that stuck out to me and many others. This ad was funny, well timed and perfectly executed. The ad I am referring to of course is the Tide ad. The ad begins as the sun is setting on a beautiful mountain road as an unmarked car is rushing by, as the camera cuts inside the car to your surprise David Harbour who plays (Chief Hopper on Stranger Things) starts talking to you about how this is “just your typical Super Bowl car ad right?” cut to the next scene and a beer is sliding down the bar to again David Harbour, only to have it fall off the bar and the whole bar laughs. The next scene looks like a glimpse into haven Where David is holding a clamshell with something inside. The next scene David dress as a cowboy leaning over a fence explaining that it is in fact an ad for Tide laundry detergent. The next cut is a mechanic under a car covered in grease except for his perfectly shirt asking, “what makes it a Tide ad?” David replies “there are no stains.” The next few scenes are a montage of cliché Super Bowl ads such as a soda pop ad, a diamond ad and a shaving razor ad. All while David interrupts them saying “No It’s a Tide ad.” The first commercial ends only two have three more occur later on in the Super Bowl that further the coping and spoofing of other Super Bowl ads such as the Old Spice, Budweiser and Mr. Clean. Combined all the ad that ran on Super Bowl Sunday for Tide was a total of about a minute and a half. Making it a series of ads also known as an ad campaign.
Analyze
What is going on in this ad is quite remarkable or as Seth Godin would say “worth remarking about.” What is so remarkable about this ad is that is breaks the formal way an ad like this should work. Normal ads about cleaning products start out by showing you a stain on cloths or a mess. This is what is known as creating a problem for the viewer. This is what makes the viewer invested in “how are they going to get that stain out it’s such a bad stain?” Then the normal ad would introduce the solution and show how it is much different than anything out on the market. For example, Oxy clean would tell you it “utilizes the stain fighting power of oxygen to lift stains.” Which leaves the viewer thinking they should get this product. All ads need something to grab the attention of the viewer, most marketers try to grab the attention of the viewer within the first five seconds. How this ad breaks the mold is that it starts out as mystery the viewer has no idea what this is a commercial for until around half way through the commercial. Instead of bandwagon marketing or hidden-fear marketing that most cleaning products use Tide two wildly new approaches. The first is the Mystery of the product and the second is the fourth wall break. Fourth wall breaking is when the character is breaking character and talking to the viewer almost as an aside as we know it in Shakespeare. It does this because it knows it’s a commercial and it spoofs other commercials. Much like how the movie Deadpool staring Ryan Reynolds made fun of other movie clichés, the commercial makes fun of cliché Super Bowl commercials by recreating them just to say “it’s not what you think it is, it’s just a Tide ad.” The ad follows the association principle. For example, there is a scene where the Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa is on a horse with a handful of diamonds. This is reminiscent of an Old Spicecommercial where Mustafa is on a horse with diamonds in his hand. But unlike the Old Spice ad the camera zooms out to reveal David Harbour also sitting on the horse saying “it’s a Tide ad.” When you first see the ad, you think it is going to be an Old Spice commercial because you associated Mustafa with Old Spice only to have him trick you into watching a tide ad.
They do this again with Mr. Cleanmuch the same way, this tactic could also be called the bait and switch. Where you think you will be seeing a Mr. Clean commercial only to find out they traded Mr. Clean for David from Stranger Things.
The ad campaign does a great job utilizing its 1.5 minutes of screen time by spoofing all ads and at the end saying, “if the commercial is clean doesn’t that make all ads a Tide ad?” At first you may think that is nothing to remark about but after two commercials pulled the bait and switch on you, (The Old Spice Tide ad and the Mr. CleanTide ad) you almost can’t go through the rest of the Super Bowl ads without thinking that the next ad you see could very well be another tide ad in disguise.
Interpretation
This ad by Tide is so new and different I have not seen anything like it before. The way they creators of this ad knew the trends and studied how people viewed the traditional Super Bowl ads. The creators saw that the same companies used the same ad platform over and over such as the beer commercial where everyone is laughing having a good time and a beer is involved or how car commercials are always on sweeping country roads overlooking mountainous landscape. Tide broke the mold by spoofing all these other kinds of ads creating its own meta ad that knows it’s an ad itself. The target audience is the viewers of the Super Bowl. The ad doesn’t really work unless played alongside the ads it is making fun of so the only real audience is that of the Super Bowl viewers. The ad is full of stereotypes, the ad itself is a stereotype either that or it makes fun of the stereotypes cliché commercials that it is mimicking. Such as the car ad and beer ad within the Tide ad.
Evaluation
I feel that the biggest strength the Tide ad had going for it was that it asked the question “So does that make every ad a Tide ad?” with the caption “if its clean, it’s got to be Tide.” What makes this so ingenious is how they followed up with this question by having multiple other ads later in the program seem like ads for other products only to hijacked and turned into tide ads. This made the viewer think that at any time the ad they were watching could be a tide ad in disguise. Read more about the Tide ad in Bobby Bruno’s Blog linked below. https://www.madmarketingpro.com/blog/tide-ad-super-bowl-2018-commercial-ad-analysis
What made the Tide ad so memorable was its ability to disguise itself as other commercials and to make you think any commercial could be a Tide ad. It did this by spoofing other commercials in its commercial.
A blog about the genius of the Tide ad below
https://somedamnmillennial.com/2018/02/06/the-genius-of-the-tide-ad/
Engaged with Tide
Some background knowledge of Tide. Around the time this commercial was coming out there was a thing called the Tide Pod Challenge where people (normally kids) would bite on a tide pod as it exploded in their mouths they would film it and post it to YouTube. This being very harmful for people to consume as the laundry detergent has harmful chemicals that are not meant to be ingested. Among this growing concern the company put out many different ad campaigns telling users not to use the pods in this way. Even Gronk of the New England Patriots was in a commercial explaining how not to use Tide Pods.
Below is the Gronk Tide Pods video
amidst all this bad press around Tidethey managed pull off arguably they best Super Bowl commercial of 2018 without even showing a Tide Pod.
Conclusion
What did you learn? I learned that tide not only created a great marketing campaign, but they also created a new type of commercial. The spoof commercial. I am sure other companies have spoofed before, but Tide did it best. Tide showed us that if its clean its got to be tide. The ad changed the way we look at Super Bowl ads in the future no longer are we going to be entertained by the same reoccurring model of commercial of beer cars and cleaning products. Companies have to try a lot harder now to grab our attention with a new and interesting marketing campaign such as this one. What surprised me when I took a closer look at this ad was how genius it was. When I first saw it, I thought it was clever but as I looked closer I noticed that it implanted into my brain the thought that during the Super Bowl ads anyone of them could be a Tide ad.
If some pictures are not showing up, I am not sure why some of the pictures are not showing up I cannot seem to fix them.
If some pictures are not showing up, I am not sure why some of the pictures are not showing up I cannot seem to fix them.
The Tide Ad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doP7xKdGOKs
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