Will you finish the puzzle?
- CG Facer
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
A short decade ago, I was enrolled in Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Business. I was studying Marketing, and for the first time in life, school seemed less like a chore and more like an opportunity. I was actually looking forward to the homework assignments; a concept that I had prior believed only existed in the fantasies of nerds and educators.
In hindsight, it's possible I may have become the former. But I digress.
I had always been aware of advertising, but the marketing program pulled the curtain back to reveal everything that happened behind the scenes. I began to see how much data was involved in creating advertising campaigns, how you can quantify the impact of thoughts and emotions, and ultimately, how all of those things work together to make the decisions that designed brands.
Long before I had ever entered the marketing program, I held something of a "romantacized" view of how companies cultivated their image. For example, as a golf-kid growing up in an era of Tiger Woods dominance, was anything cooler than this from Nike?
But as I soon discovered in my studies, sometimes "Cool" meant different things to different people. It turns out there were plenty of women (and some men) who didn't agree with the concept that "Winning was an excuse for cheating on your wife dozens of times."
Rather, good marketing isn't based on a hunch about what you believe is "cool" or "fun".
It's a puzzle filled with statistics that comes together in a calculated and sometimes creative solution.
We all know that Super Bowl Sunday is a big day for commercials, but for the marketers of the world, it's a telling day-
Who is completing the puzzle and who is drawing in the missing pieces?
Here's what I mean-
USA Today releases annual rankings of every Super Bowl commercial that airs on national television. These ads are rated on a scale of 1-5 from the USA Today group of "panelists".
Poppi Soda, a prebiotic soda that is advertised as a healthier alternative to traditional sodas, released a 30-second ad. It received a 2.44 score and was ranked 49th on the list of 54.
Must be awful, right?
If you want to watch the commercial, you can see it here.
If this seemed bizarre or pointless, don't worry about it. It wasn't for you.
Poppi's predominant consumer demographic is women, and the majority of them are between the ages of 18-34. Again, not the majority group you'll find on the Center of Gravity blog (but to those of you who are here, thanks for being here!)
Let's keep that in mind and look at some more numbers-
About 75% of people between the ages of 18-34 watch the Super Bowl; 46% of Super Bowl viewers are women.
The predominant woman featured in this ad is Pop Artist Charli XCX. The song being played in the ad is from her 2024 album, "Brat".
This album prompted an extremely popular trend on social media titled "Brat Summer". The hashtag #Brat has subsequently been used in millions of individual posts from users on Instagram and TikTok.
Over 50% of Poppi purchasers are women between the ages of 18-34. There are over 550 Million women in that age range on TikTok
As of publishing this on February 18th, the last 20 videos posted on the official Poppi TikTok page have just under 90,000 views total. The Charli XCX commercial posted on their TikTok page has 2.7 Million views.
So what does it all mean?
The people who might like Poppi were in fact watching the Super Bowl. And more importantly, the people who were supposed to love the Poppi ad loved it.
In fact, they were such fans that they went and found it on TikTok to watch it again. And they commented things like only Gen Z can-
Poppi found a figurehead that was popular among their targeted demographic and created a commercial that was entertaining specifically for those people. Poppi showed the advertisement in a place where it would be seen by their target audience, and they didn't do anything to alienate any other groups. Bingo.
Marketing like this doesn't happen by accident. It takes a very tailored approach to come up with something that many groups are indifferent towards and yet a hit with the exact people it's made for.
And don't doubt that Poppi's owner, PepsiCo, doesn't know how to make a commercial for the masses. Their Pepsi commercial was ranked 3rd overall on USA Today's list.
Just about everyone is in the market for Pepsi. So Pepsi makes a commercial for just about everyone.
But what about the other side of things? What does it look like when we forget to turn every page?
Amazon's Ring found this out the hard way.
Ring's commercial titled, "Be a Hero in Your Neighborhood", advertised a new feature that will allow Ring cameras in the same neighborhood to recognize and track pets as they travel through the neighborhood. The goal of the product is to help identify pets when they're lost, hopefully leading to a faster return to their homes. By purchasing the Ring camera, you have the opportunity to "Be a Hero in Your Neighborhood" for free!
It's a sweet and sentimental ad, which earned it a top ten spot from the USA Today panel.
But there's a huge problem: The message received by most people wasn't that you are going to be a hero.
It's that you're being spied on.
Viewers of the commercial weren't focused on the positive benefits of the facial recognition for the pets at all. They could only think about how the technology might be used to constantly record people indiscriminately. The ad was no longer sentimental; it was sinister.
Within a week of the Super Bowl, Ring announced that it had ended its partnership with the police surveillance tech company Flock Safety. Ring didn't advise if the advertisement's backlash was the cause for the partnership ending, but it's hard to imagine there wasn't a connection there.
Ring is an Amazon company, which makes it difficult to understand where the breakdown was here. It's impossible to think that they lacked the resources to do complete market testing of this commercial; did they just test the wrong demographic? Unlikely.
A more probable scenario is that they tested this advertising too closely to their target demographic.
If you showed this advertisement to pet owners, especially pet owners who at one point in time lost their pets, it would probably be a huge hit. The idea of a product that can quickly find your lost dog or cat when you're in that moment of worry? That's great!
But what about everyone else?
This isn't just a strange Poppi ad that you don't understand. This is a a notice from Ring that says,
"Hey, we're watching you."
Suddenly, you're no longer dealing with indifference from a non-target demographic. Rather, now you have anger. So much so that people who probably weren't going to buy your product anyway are now trying to convince your targeted demographic that they shouldn't buy the product either.
Time will tell how painful the oversight will be for Ring. But as people are now reconsidering their use of home surveillance cameras altogether, it's reasonable to expect they're going to wish they had another shot at this one.
It's worth noting that like the Super Bowl, all of the commercials that air during it, "are just one game". Throughout all of time, there have been countless well-marketed companies that did not show up with their best stuff when things mattered most. Conversely, there have been thousands of ads that were made off of a "hunch" that turned out to be home runs.
But something I've always loved about marketing since I first started to learn about it was that it's really just a big puzzle that anyone can solve.
You just have to be willing to find all the pieces.
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