Innovation in Practice Blog
The Patterns in Super Bowl Commercials
Super Bowl commercials capture our attention because they tend to be highly creative and well-produced. At $3.5 million dollars for a thirty second spot, Super Bowl advertisers need to create the best, most innovative commercials possible. To do that, they use patterns. Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures. Their book, “Cracking the Ad Code,” defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them.
Here are the eight tools:
1. Unification
2. Activation
3. Metaphor
4. Subtraction
5. Extreme Consequence
6. Absurd Alternative
7. Inversion
8. Extreme Effort
Let’s see how yesterday’s 2012 Super Bowl ads fit these patterns.
The LAB: Innovating the GPS with Attribute Dependency (January 2012)
GPS technology is great at getting you from Point A to Point B. What if you had a system that alerted you to risk of crime, weather, points of interest, and cost savings tips along the way? Microsoft seems headed this way given a newly-awarded patent that ties GPS location to useful information for pedestrians. Here is a description:
“As a pedestrian travels, various difficulties can be encountered, such as traveling through an unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures. A route can be developed for a person taking into account factors that specifically affect a pedestrian. Moreover, the route can alter as a situation of a user changes; for instance, if a user wants to add a stop along a route.”
This is a classic example of the Attribute Dependency Technique, one of five in Systematic Inventive Thinking. It creates a correlation (dependency) between a person’s location and the type of information that is sent to the device. Microsoft’s new concept gathers data, analyzes the data and user requirements, then generates suggested routes. It considers the user’s preferences such as avoiding neighborhoods that exceed a certain threshold of violent crime statistics. The system might direct you to “take the subway” rather than walk if rain was expected. It even considers cost factors such as parking, extra traffic, and other situations that might make you vary your path.
The Innovation Tools Graduate Course
I’m looking forward to teaching “Innovation Tools,” the graduate marketing course at the University of Cincinnati. The course teaches how to use Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method based on three ideas. First, most successful innovations over time followed one of five patterns, and these patterns are like the DNA of products that can be re-applied to innovate any product or service. Second, innovation happens when we start with a configuration (the “solution”) and work backwards to the “problem” that it solves. It turns out that humans are better at this than the traditional “problem-to-solution” approach to innovating. Finally, better innovation happens when we start within the world of the problem (the Closed World). Innovations that use elements of the problem or surrounding environment are more novel and surprising. We innovate “inside the box,” not outside.
Redeploying Your Core Competencies
Read this partial list of core competencies for a particular firm and try to guess what industry it is in:
1. Consumer insights: understanding what consumer want
2. Design: making things easy to use
3. Innovation: coming up with new ideas routinely
4. Systems integration: making things work together
5. Customer relationships: forming and maintaining customer loyalty
From this list alone, you could imagine this firm being part of virtually any industry. In fact, the firm with these core competencies would likely be the leader of that industry. Which company owns these skills?
In 2008, managers at Kodak cited these skills as their core competencies. Less than four years later, Kodak is on the verge of bankruptcy, ending the reign of a once proud and legenday 120 year old brand. It is now forced to sell its massive patent estate to raise operating cash.
What happened? Many will cite the familiar reasons: failure to innovate, slow to move into digital photography, poor execution of digital photography, and so on. Yet none of these reasons are correct. Kodak was a highly innovative firm. It invented digital photography long before it wiped out its paper film business. Kodak was a marketing powerhouse. It could execute marketing campaigns and brand building with the best of them.
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