In this blog, I'm revisiting the remarkable ad-creation marketplace Tongal, which had its own recent Super Bowl victory.
As everyone knows, the Super Bowl is almost as much about the commercials as it is about football. The Monday-morning quarterbacking of what particular ads were touchdowns or which ones were fumbles is as much an entertainment ritual as is the game itself, even one as exciting and surprising as this year's was.
Most advertisers spend millions upon millions of dollars to buy commercial time during the Super Bowl, and millions in creating eye-popping ads, hoping to create catchy, unforgettable commercials. Unfortunately, most Super Bowl commercials end up being unmemorable. Costly mistakes for brands and creative flameouts for advertising firms.
And then there's Tongal.
I recently wrote about Tongal, which uses competitions and crowdsourcing to create commercials at a fraction of the price of those produced by traditional advertising agencies. As I wrote, "Tongal can help you create TV-quality video commercials 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster with 10 times the number of content options than by standard means."
And many times more effective, too. In fact, James DeJulio, co-founder and president of Tongal, got in touch with me to let me know about a commercial that was produced through Tongal, which ended up airing during the Super Bowl and which "did great," DeJulio said. The ad was created as part of a $17,000 challenge for Colgate-Palmolive's Speed Stick deodorant brand, "and not originally intended for anything beyond digital," DeJulio told me.
But this ad actually finished at #24 on USA Today's ad meter, well ahead of more than 30 other ads created traditionally, "with budgets that are literally 500 times larger in some cases," he said. (Consider that for one of its Super Bowl commercials, luxury carmaker Mercedes apparently paid $1.5 million for the rights to use the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil.")
The television audience for the Super Bowl has been estimated at more than 110 million people, and on YouTube, this Speed Stick commercial has been seen almost 1.2 million times (nowadays, attracting online attention is an important part of a brand's marketing).
By unleashing creativity from unexpected places -- people working in their garage studios, DeJulio has said -- Tongal has been able to tap into what DeJulio calls "that amazing crowd of genius."
This innovative approach to content creation will continue as more companies realize that bold, imaginative solutions can often come from unlikely places. The Super Bowl triumph was not only a victory for the Baltimore Ravens. For Tongal, DeJulio says, "it was a HUGE step forward for us."
In my next blog, I'm going to look at Chris Anderson's DIY Drones, and how his model of creating a "Do It Yourself" community has allowed him, and can allow you, to be surrounded by the smartest people around to help realize a dream.
NOTE: Over the next year, I'm embarking on a BOLD mission -- to speak to top CEOs and entrepreneurs to find out their secrets to success. My last book Abundance, which hit No. 1 on Amazon, No. 2 on the New York Times and was at the top of Bill Gates' personal reading list, shows us the technologies that empower us to create a world of Abundance over the next 20 to 30 years. BOLD, my next book, will provide you with tools you can use to make your dreams come true and help you solve the world's grand challenges to create a world of Abundance. I'm going to write this book and share it with you every week through a series of blog posts. Each step of the way, I'll ask for your input and feedback. Top contributors will be credited within the book as a special "thank you," and all contributors will be recognized on the forthcoming BOLD book website. To ensure you never miss a message, sign up for my newsletter here.