Five reasons why #TideAd is the best advertising ever made

#TideAd is not just the best Super Bowl ad in 2018.

It is the best Super Bowl advertising of all time.

I think it is also the best advertising ever made.

If you haven't seen it yet I envy you. The first time is special.

Watch the 1:45 film and enjoy it, it's really nice.

There's a big gap between a nice ad and the best advertising of all time. Let me give you five reasons why I think it hands-down beats everything that came before it:

1. Big Pressure - they really needed this to succeed

2. Preparation & Partnerships - a strong brief and strong team

3. A Brave Prediction - they told us to expect something special

4. Executed to Perfection - beautifully choreographed large-scale execution

5. With Purity – no nonsense, no waste, no gimmicks, no frills

Big Pressure

"Under the greatest pressures, diamonds are made"

#TideAd is the best advertising ever made because it succeeded at a time when only the best ad ever made would do. Right now CPG businesses like P&G are under immense pressure to prove to themselves, to their shareholders and the industry at large (and notably to Amazon) that they are still geniuses when it comes to the mass marketing skills that grow big brands. P&G has had some high profile detractors in the past year, questioning their marketing approaches. The business is under scrutiny from all quarters.

The Super Bowl is a big gamble (excuse the pun). Get it wrong then you hand the dissenters and competitors Exhibit A in their tireless case-building against the 'CPG giant' model.

Many CPG companies have previously failed, but in the 2018 Super Bowl P&G’s Tide showed everyone that they’ve still got it and anyone wanting to write off giant CPG companies would be wise to think again.

#TideAd is what happens when a brand is able to reduce waste in the media supply chain and invest that money back into the talent and creativity to do advertising properly.

The agency was under real pressure too. In an environment where P&G is publicly slashing the number of agencies it uses and cutting their agency costs by moving to more project work, Saatchi & Saatchi NY (for it was they) had to make a good case for a continued healthy retainer in an environment of healthy cost-cutting.

It might be too dramatic to call this a Hail Mary play for Saatchi and P&G but its pretty close. Success meant glory, failure meant humiliation. Those were the stakes of this game. 

Preparation and Partnerships

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening my axe"

It’s the best advertising ever made because it demonstrates world-class collaboration and preparation as three vital ingredients came together beautifully:

• A bold brief to “own" the Super Bowl, despite being a traditionally low interest category (this isn't the exact brief but my understanding of it)
• A killer (media) insight that to "own the Super Bowl" you don't need to make the most memorable ad, you just need to distract viewers from appreciating all the other ads and make it fun” (again, my words)
• Most importantly, a brave P&G leader who went all-in on a big idea, trusted their agencies and galvanised internal teams across marketing disciplines

The stakes were high in this the most hotly contested and keenly observed advertising environment in the world. Screw ups are expensive and humiliating.

Tide spent around $23m on prime Super Bowl airtime for this ad. With a 45 second ad in the first break then a 15-second reminder in each quarter break, it had a huge presence in the biggest TV event in the US. This will be the single biggest media buy in the world in 2018, just consider what it takes as a marketer to be able to make that size of bet, you have to be very comfortable with the team around you and that takes incredible preparation and a relationship akin to a partnership, not a supplier.

This truly was a big bet, even for an audience of more than 103m people it is a one-off, the creative was tailor-made specifically for a single time and place, the best media moment on the planet. On this one moment, Tide gambled that their creativity was good enough to succeed.

In my opinion, #TideAd was even better than Volvo Interception which I previously thought was the best Super Bowl ad based on a media insight, because it achieved something similar without actually buying a spot in the game. This time, by asking viewers to think about Tide throughout all the ad breaks in the Super Bowl, Tide brought a fun game to the big game, not just memorable but truly engaging, it asks the viewer to join in, it turns ad breaks into a game, even better than Volvo did in 2015.

A Bold Prediction

"If you can look unto the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me"

Shakespeare knew as well as anyone how tough it is to predict an outcome. Yet P&G have been teasing us that something like #TideAd was on the cards.

The most impressive tricks always start with a “watch this!” before executing. Announcing you are going to do something special in advance doesn't help you achieve it, it just raises the stakes even further.

#TideAd is the best ad ever made because P&G told us in advance that they were going to make great ads. When P&G's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard called out the media ecosystem in 2017, he did so because he wanted to reduce the "crap" and waste in the media supply chain to allow his marketers to invest back into creativity.

That was echoed by P&G’s CFO Jon Moeller in January 2018 who said about the company's advertising approach: “We will pay for talent”.

#TideAd is what happens when a brand is able to reduce waste in the media supply chain and invest in the talent and creativity to do advertising properly.

Hopefully, more will follow suit.

Executed to Perfection

"Success is 1% idea and 99% execution"

#TideAd is the best advertising ever made because it is executed to perfection. In fact, it’s a good old-fashioned TV ad in many ways, albeit an epic one with a cast of 30 people, 2 horses and 15 individual locations across 4 different executions. Crammed into just 1 minute 45 seconds of prime media airtime.

I’m not saying this is the best advertising copy ever written nor the best film ever produced. When I mentioned on Twitter and YouTube that I thought #TideAd was the best ad ever made, a bunch of people messaged me to propose alternatives, all amazing advertising films, but mostly they were simply suggesting their favourite ad. I like lots of other ads too.

But Tide is more than a smart 30-second film, it transcends creative production and media buying. It is a carefully choreographed script, development and placement which is surgically efficient in its use of very expensive media time.

With Purity

"I’ll make a confession...P&G believed the myth that we could be a "first mover" on all of the latest shiny objects...We’ve come to our senses"

That was Marc Pritchard in his landmark media transparency speech in January 2017.

The final reason why I think #TideAd is the best advertising in the world because it grabbed attention without resorting to any of the buzzwords or gimmicks prevalent in the narrative about advertising these days.

In an age when the attention paid to advertising is always with an innovation agenda framed by technology, such as the new latest fad and shiny thing, #TideAd has been a refreshing, cleansing antidote.

What now?

I hope #TideAd can act as a new benchmark for the quality of advertising (and advertising awards) in the coming years.

Expect to see more of these CPG giants defending their brands in the biggest ways possible by investing in great mass marketing moments, paid for by cutting wasted dollars from the crappy media supply chain.

The future is bright and white indeed.

Update: May 2019

#TideAd Named Most Effective Advertising Campaign Of The Year

It is more than one year after my original post. I'm not one to say "I told you so", but hey I told you so...

Last night in New York the Tide Ad was awarded the highest honor at the Effies, the largest advertising award show which demands to see both business effectiveness as well as creativity. Full write up in AdAge

Plus Professor Mark Ritson explains why Tide won the top award and why this strategy was so effective in defending Tide's dominant market share and price premium. The first of a brilliant series of films by Mark looking into what makes the most effective advertising. Thanks Mark.

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Disclosure: My company ID Comms works with P&G. But sadly we had absolutely nothing to do at all with the success of #TideAd.

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Tom Denford is North American CEO of ID Comms, the global management consultancy specializing in media and advertising.

www.idcomms.com