Best Buy’s holiday advertising campaign started yesterday with a spot entitled “Game On, Santa,” in which a mom buys stuff at the store and gets to tell a surprised Santa on Christmas Eve that he might as well give his gifts to the family dog. You see, the idea is to make moms feel “victorious” in their role as “chief gift givers” during the holidays, and the spot tested well -- what was important was that audiences thought it was fun, and that it didn’t trash Santa too much -- so the company is putting big bucks behind it.
What a fantasy. It’s not thinking time anymore, it’s selling and buying time. Not only is the campaign wholly irrelevant to this behavior, it’s utterly forgettable.
It’s time to communicate earlier, more, cheaper, and other objectively real shopper benefits. If moms are the targets, which is a great point to debate sometime other than five weeks before Christmas, is their primary need right now to stick it to Santa? It just seems so abstract, so removed from the reality of finding and affording the right gifts. Promising gifts for under $100 is like telling everyone that your store has doors on it, or that it's filled with breathable air.
Imagine if the campaign were focused on providing moms real tools for accomplishing their goals (and thus feeling morally vindicated, or whatever)...scheduling individual shoppers, offering special financing plans for better customers, maybe selling insurance protection on purchases that improves the return/exchange equation. I don’t know.
Why is the creative challenge to come up with an idea or mental state instead of figure out how to communicate admittedly unsexy experiential benefits into things that are fun and motivational? It’s quite possible that the campaign could get moms to think the very things it aspires to promote, and yet Best Buy might not sell anything on top of it. Think this is a risk? I know the agencies did, since the likelihood is next to zero that they were willing to take the lion’s share of their potential compensation in a revenue-share deal coming from the efficacy of the campaign (or even from Best Buy’s performance overall).
No, it’s advertising as usual, and it’s a marketing fantasy.
I’m so done with big ideas, really. They sound so decisive and smart when you describe them -- the Best Buy folks wax poetic about how they’re going to break through the clutter, and that simplicity and focus are so important to the campaign -- but in reality they’re all tangential to the only idea that matters: selling. Call the creative dance what you will but it still leaves consumers standing in place when the music stops.
Truly new marketing wouldn’t waste time or money moving so far away from selling and instead come up with new ways to make it inexorably important and motivational.
Does anybody have to visit Best Buy after watching the “Game On, Santa” spot? Is there anything in the spot that is uniquely and inspiringly Best Buy? Are gifts under $100 really all that special?
Nope.
It’s too bad. The company needs some novel thinking and it’s not going to have any in market this holiday season. You’d think that reporting comp store sales declines for five consecutive quarters would have moved the company’s brain trust to do something different, but “Game On, Santa” is just more of the same ‘ol marketing.
It’s a fantasy the company can ill afford.
