While many might have difficulty understanding what Salesforce.com’s Superbowl ad is all about, to me personally it reflects Salesforce.com inner corporate culture and way of thinking 100%.
It’s bold. It’s rides the wave of popularity. It’s a young crowd that runs a business. Business is play and play is business. It’s a place where executive dreams are being realized.
And, reflected by a stock price that far exceeds hard-number financial valuation, so far Salesforce.com has been able to manage just fine with riding hype cycles, tapping trends, and being hip.
Competitive Evaluation
The way to evaluate Salesforce.com’s superbowl ad is to reflect on the big-picture competitive scenario. Chatter.com is not so much competing with ‘tiny’ Yammer as Salesforce.com is competing with mass-market player Microsoft.
Today, everyone knows Microsoft. Everyone already owns one or more of its products. That Golliath Microsoft is now going after the cloud, Salesforce.com market segment. Moreover, it’s vital move. Microsoft has to go there for survival. (Did I read 5 minutes ago ‘PCs are dead’? I did.) Microsoft’s current offering of an extremely low $34 a head for cloud services, i.e. about 1/2-1/3 the cost of its closest competitors (incl. Salesforce.com), is tell-tale of what lies up ahead.
Microsoft’s core strategic mission has been to get 2 cts from everyone in the world of computing. Prices have always been affordable and products rather good. Competitive strategy has been to gain market (segment) dominance as fast as possible. Then it typically locks competition out by creating interactivity across Microsoft products/services while simultaneously creating incompatibility with competitors products/services, buying up competition or otherwise threatening them out of the market. It kept the money stream continuous through new version release.
Twitter+FB+CRM+Good/Cartoon/Fun/Celeb= serious salesforce business.
Now, for Salesforce.com to effectively compete with Microsoft, they have to be like David and think out-of-the-box. To be brave beyond believe. Play is business. Being hip … is doing good, … is cartooning, … is embracing African American, … is Salesforce.com.
Superbowl ads create broad market awareness. Plus, they iconically show off companies who are ‘with it’ and ‘who have made it’. That’s what the $3m paid for. Whether or not it was marketing money well spent depends on Salesforce.com’s accompanying marketing and sales action. After all, David did bring 5 stones for his sling to the battle.
I disagree.
Even if you have the money, spending $3 Million to show that you’ve “made it” is a major waste of money. SFDC had a great opportunity to exapand their brand in a non-monetary way with a captive audience full of an eclectic mix of viewers. Their ads were contrived and amateurish, and severly underminded the complexity of what their product is. In 2011, there is no such thing as “any publicity is good publicity”. People are watching and judging at the same time. Just simply seeing the product being advertised isnt enough, and the superbowl is that mentality many times over. Each second of every ad is discussed and compared. Good or Bad ads are more newsworthy than the ads themselves.
You are right that advertising in the superbowl provides insight into where a company is right now, and SFDC showed that it does not belong where it thinks it does.