Tuesday, February 3, 2009

KWWL Superbowl Ads

Here are 4 spots, in the order they ran:









The "censored by the NFL" gag was too hard to read(in fact, I'm not sure what it actually said)

The "point" of the 4th spot left alot to be desired. Seemed like begging to me.

Thoughts on these spots from a very small station in Iowa?

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

It sure got my attention! For those people who don't normally watch this channel, they might now.

Definitely outside the box.

Anonymous said...

I liked the idea... Although their graphic artists/ producers need to dig a little further into their AE manuals.

Huss said...

On the fullscreen and full-res, you can read it enough.

And to the point about begging on the 4th spot - we agonized over that, and really wanted to make sure it didn't come across that way. The non-TV folks we screened it for did not get that impression.

A secondary goal to these spots was to generate additional web traffic for our site - which it did. The spots on our site were the most viewed video clips that day.

As to Chris' comments about AE manuals, can you be a bit more specific?

Anonymous said...

I guess just nitpicky stuff, but the explosion looked like a static image of a flame with a wave warp on it. You may have been better off employing a displacement map. And I'm not huge on sweeps with light burst, but that's just me.

IDOPROMOZ said...

I should have added -- I do applaud the station for not being traditional. So many stations do the typical stuff -- and these guys made an effort to stand out.

Huss said...

Hey thanks! And I should have added about taking exception to the whole "small" station in Iowa. :)

Anonymous said...

I liked that they were so different but the last spot left a lot to be desired. I really liked that they had a timeline so it kept viewers engaged. I think I would have left out the bleeps, it didn't really work with the spots. Good job on creativity... I'm sure you didn't have a huge budget for this.

Anonymous said...

Huss, did you get John Young to riff on the scripts for you? Some of the stuff that comes out of his mouth has had my newsroom in tears from laughter. Of course most of that was unusable on air... :-)

Nice spots for trying to stand out a bit from the clutter you were probably running otherwise.

Huss said...

@Anon - I see what you're saying, and out of context, I would agree with you. But the final spot ran during a flurry of other ads in the game with plenty of motion, sounds, chaos. The idea was to go the other way to grab that attention.

@Brian - Yeah, JY was a pretty good sport about it. He didn't think the word 'crap' would fly, so he cut a few other versions. He is an interesting man, to be sure. :)

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I found them quite funny.

The third one was my favorite. I think the fourth spot could have continued with the schtick...it's the superbowl after all.

Good job at thinking outside of the box.

Anonymous said...

Kudos! That's a lot of work for 4 spots that will never air again. But I have to agree that the last spot fell flat with me. I was waiting for this really clean, kick-ass promo about your news coverage and I get these two begging for viewers (imo).
Good concept overall, though.
BTW Huss-your "staff" looks just like you! And my favorite was the sports guy!

Anonymous said...

Kudos for being different and trying a different way to grab the attention of viewers... However production was a little weak in places and the end of spot did not live up to the hype... Not to mention the end all message they wanted to leave viewers with was that they were a different kind of news... but gave no reason for viewers to believe that claim... course I guess they did say that they had 'good' news didn't they? "Watch us because we're the only good news in Iowa" :) But I'm sure they got viewers watching the spots... so step one accomplished... too many promo people out there are afraid to rock the boat.