Stupor Sunday for Wireless

Super Bowl XXXVII was a yawner--and the commercials weren’t any better. Typically a highlight of even the most lopsided blowout, this year’s Super Sunday ads were as uniformly off-target as a Rich Gannon pass. At first blush, that makes it tough to say whether the near-complete absence of wireless spots from the proceedings was a good thing or not. On the one hand, you have to commend the cash-strapped industry for not wasting an average of $2 million per 30-second ad on a game that was a fait accompli by the middle of the second quarter--no commercial, no matter how imaginative, can recapture the casual viewer’s attention once the rout is on. But on the other hand, is it ever wise to be so conspicuously absent from the world’s biggest stage?

Even without standard commercial clips, of course, wireless brands are never too far from any sporting event thanks to the myriad sponsorship deals carriers and handset manufacturers have cut with stadiums and broadcast networks. This year’s Super Bowl was played at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, and ABC’s pre-game and halftime entertainment was sponsored by AT&T Wireless, which last year used Super Sunday to launch its mLife campaign. Before this year’s game, AT&T Wireless tried to convince viewers to actually start using those services, asking its 20 million customers to send text messages to answer a trivia question and call a play. (Hopefully the latter didn’t result in one of Gannon’s five interceptions.)

AT&T Wireless also contributed the only two full-fledged wireless spots of the game. The first--speculating whether the castaways of TV staple “Gilligan’s Island” would have been rescued had Gilligan washed ashore with a wireless phone--was tired and silly, especially in light of a similar spot about a FedEx employee marooned on an island for five years who, on his return to civilization, finally delivers a package that was in his care the entire time. (Its contents: a satellite phone and a GPS receiver.) The second, an “Antiques Roadshow” knockoff speculating on a future where conventional landline phones are now worthless relics of a long-ago era, was marginally better, although it appeared so late in the game that many viewers had long since tuned out.

How did viewers who stuck around respond? Based on one focus group--specifically, the dozen or so friends with whom I watched the game--not particularly well. “They showed a lot of those mLife ads last year,” said one. “Yeah, and I still don’t know what mLife means,” said another. And that was pretty much the extent of their reaction.

Last year’s enigmatic mLife teaser campaign was designed to baffle and intrigue viewers. AT&T Wireless Services Vice President of Marketing and Advertising Neve Savage told Wireless Review in Feb. 2001: “The critic who doesn’t understand the ads has been effectively seduced by us. The rest of the advertising starts to put substantial flesh on the bones and spell out everything in detail. The real understanding is in the future.” But just how far off is that future? A year in, shouldn’t people know by now what mLife means, what it is and what it’s all about?

So that’s it--corporate sponsorship few seemed to notice, an SMS dog-and-pony show before the game, and two 30-second spots advertising services that many viewers still don’t understand. Nothing whatsoever to get people really excited about mobile technology. In short, AT&T Wireless and, to a much lesser extent, Qualcomm managed to spend millions and still seem almost invisible. But as they say in sports, there’s always next year. Except that in wireless, people say that about everything these days.