Muse: See MoonPie's Twisted Super Bowl Ad, Which Ran at Gas Stations Across America

By: Tim Nudd | Muse

MoonPie and its agency, Tombras, have done lots of fun stuff around the Super Bowl in recent years. 

Two years ago, they wrote nine absurd scripts for Super Bowl ads they would have aired, if they'd had the budget. Last year, they went ahead and shot three of those spots.

Now, for year three of what they're calling #TheBigThing, they've finally aired a national spot. Well, kind of. The 80-second spot ran nationwide Sunday at gas stations across America, catching viewers as they were picking up snacks for the game. 

The ad features the family from last year's ad who welcomed a MoonPie child to their brood. In a nice meta touch, the spot itself takes place partly as a gas station:

Gas station screens don't normally host content nearly as fun as this. Tombras used GSTV's data-driven, national video network, which reaches one in three Americans monthly at more than 22,000 fuel retailers across the country.

"This would seem like a crazy idea for most brands, but it's perfect for MoonPie because it's an 'Outta This World' creative idea and media placement," says Dooley Tombras, president at Tombras. "Millions of consumers stop by gas station convenience stores on their way to parties or to stock up for their own gatherings. So not only did we finally make a TV spot for MoonPie, but we did it while making sure we were in the right place at the right time with a spot worthy of advertising's biggest day." 

"Living in New York City for nine years, where they have these baby gas stations, it had been a while since I'd been to a real American fuel stop," adds Jeff Benjamin, chief creative officer at Tombras. "The innovation that's taken place fueled our thinking, and made GSTV the perfect 'Outta This World' platform for our trilogy. What a fun way to keep this campaign running. I'm pumped."

"When Tombras approached us, we immediately realized their idea was a stroke of genius—and not just because of the spot's creative vision," says Sean McCaffrey, president and CEO at GSTV. "Brands today know it's increasingly difficult to find moments when consumer attention is truly focused, so with an unavoidably attention-grabbing spot, and a media buy that leverages the full scale and capabilities of GSTV, it's the perfect way to stand out."

The spot also ran in social media, where MoonPie has a large and devoted audience. Check out last year's spot, "The Family," which was a kind of prequel to this year's.

Read the official release here!

Adweek: Why CES Has Become a Must-Do for Marketers and Agencies

GSTV's Sean McCaffrey on what to expect at CES 2020

By: Sara Jerde | Adweek

The schedule at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is full of sessions related to OTT and connected TV, new tech in the travel industry and even a surprise speaker in Ivanka Trump (who is expected to talk about the administration’s policies regarding technology education for workers).

We chatted with Sean McCaffrey, CEO and president of video network GSTV, about what he’s expecting at CES 2020 and how the event has changed.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What are you looking to get out of CES this year?
It’s a great place to rocket into the new year, where everybody comes back from the holidays and crash lands into this massive show. A huge percentage of people who go to the show probably don’t even hit the convention center, because there’s the whole other tribe of marketers and publishers that take over conference rooms and hotel rooms to talk about the latest innovation. A new phone might be a great consumer device, but it disrupts advertising models, it changes content distribution.

As a unique video platform, we’re there to talk to partners that know us already, like brands and agencies. We’re there to talk to partners that can help our business and add value to those brands and agencies like data partners, video platform partners and so on. Companies we already work with—publisher partners, content creators and makers—a lot of them are there. It’s a place where a high level of folks across the industry come together.

How have you watched it change?
This is my seventh year. Even in that short time, I’ve seen it change from really just a core tech show into a place that marketers, brands and agencies feel like they have to be because technology innovation can have really massive impact on advertising models and consumer connection. For us as a smaller publisher, competing in a sea of giants, it’s a place where top-to-top conversations come together to start the year.

Everyone is so overscheduled that everyone has tried to coordinate and consolidate conversations and content. People have gotten smarter about how they use their time there. People have also gotten realistic about what they expect from the show.

I think some of the overinvestment has faded. People are smart; how they spend their money, for their brand and their company, as well as the kind of conversations they schedule. One of the things I used to barely hear that I’ve heard from at least a dozen people this year: ‘If I can see you in New York, I’m not going to see you at CES.’ And I think that’s smart. People want to use their time wisely.

How does CES compare to the types of conversations you have with potential brand partners at other conferences, like Cannes?
They’re different from a calendar standpoint. CES starts the year, and the show is supposed to be built around innovation, but now it’s the place most publishers talk about what they’re doing differently in the year ahead. It’s a unique combination of marketers, brands, content creators and makers, technology companies, ad tech companies and investors.

Converse to Cannes. Cannes is a more global show and it comes from an ethos originally of creativity. It brings a different type of attendee.

As the ad-tech marina is to Cannes, so too is the private hotel suite in a Vegas hotel high rise. It’s a place where those sorts of people are both looking to make deals, but the overall ethos of the show is different. For Cannes, it’s after the upfronts and NewFronts. It’s later in the year, after a number of big media investment decisions have already been made, it’s not necessarily as much about what’s going to happen in the year. It’s also a reflection backwards on the first half and ahead to the second half.

What trends from the media industry do you see dominating the conversation this year?
The changes in data privacy, how will that impact marketing plans? And how will it impact platforms? Everyone is talking about it, everyone’s planning for it, but it’s finally becoming real as the laws go into effect. So, the confluence of ad tech, martech, brand, agencies and so on, people are really trying to understand what that will mean on a go-forward basis.

The OTT/connected TV space is a really interesting one where that’s going to dominate the discussion this year, because it’s consumer technology.

Any advice for a CES first-timer?
Wear very comfortable shoes. Eat when you see food because you might not know when you’ll be eating next; you’re going to be talking so much. You’re told to bring all sorts of SPF to Cannes. And despite it being Vegas, you need to bring a winter coat.

In 2020, Content Diversification Will be Brands’ Top Challenge and Opportunity

Lack of order and predictability in how content is consumed is reaching new scale; budgets are shifting to reflect it 

Sean McCaffrey, President and CEO, GSTV  | Abridged version on Campaign

As CEO of a national media network, I spend the majority of my time meeting with global brands across nearly every consumer category, to better understand how they’re specifically solving marketing problems. The buzzwords may change, but core challenges often remain the same. And all involve driving business and brand growth with marketing expected to deliver as a key growth driver.  What they share paints a picture of the problems they’re facing now, and the headwinds they’re planning for in 2020.

The through-line in 2019 is that the forces impacting their marketing are guided by the invisible hand of content diversification - both the cause of and solution to these problems. As consumers spread out in pursuit of their interests, the smartest people in our industry devise ways to turn that differentiation into usable data that can help brands get closer to them. The data-driven debate has raged for the past decade on targeting vs scale, reach vs personalization, and brand vs growth marketing. 

In 2020, consumers ready to scroll and skip at scale, will crash headlong into other trends that create new challenges and opportunities. Below are a collection of topics and trends from my conversations with brands, each of which is grappling with a shift in the content landscape, with notes on their approach to adapting. 

TV TUNE OUT & CONTENT CONSUMPTION SHIFTS

A November report from eMarketer suggests that linear budgets will drop below 30% of total spend next year, for the first time ever. The question for brands whose dollars are part of that $2.4b dollar spending gap, is: how will they spend it, if not on TV?

Behind this massive shift is the continued decline in broadcast viewership, which is perhaps the biggest driver of change impacting marketing today. While TV was at the center of the Big Bang that led to the the narrative-driven advertising universe we all emerged from, today it more closely resembles a star that’s about to implode.

Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV+, NBC’s Peacock, Hulu, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok and many others are filling the void. Baby Yoda aside, the wars being waged by all of these companies as they pursue advertiser dollars are anything but cute. And the rise of more services, subscriptions and consumer control is a boon for content bingers, but yet again a challenge for marketers to balance reach, targeting and strategy in a media plan needing to solve serious marketing challenges.

Brands have to navigate them all, which means their budgets need to be built for agility. The days of set-it-and-forget-it are long gone; brands need to know where every dollar was spent and what it did for the brand, no questions asked.

Take Hershey’s for example. Six years ago, they were convinced linear TV was the way to go, representing 97% of their budget. This year, linear is under 50%, underscoring that diversifying their media investment is key for growing their brands and reaching new customers.

Of course, TV isn’t going down without a fight. Earlier this year, Nielsen announced it will be counting “out of home” viewing – watching via mobile, in hotels, restaurants and at other people’s houses – to give a clearer picture of true audience size. As the trend away from TV isn’t slowing, this likely won’t solve the problem, but it will soften the blow.

EXTERNAL PRESSURES: SUMMER OLYMPICS & PRESIDENTIAL RACE 

Layering onto the shifts in consumer content consumption, and fight for attention in 2020, are external pressures like the summer Olympics and the presidential race. They’ll live on TV (broadcast, cable and satellite alike), digital (in the form of media coverage and video) and social (breaking news and video). They will occupy mindshare, but also dominate the year in terms of available ad inventory, driving up prices and demand (per eMarketer, not enough to offset total losses for the year), again distorting the environment for brand and consumer connection.

The unprepared will be left to search for advertising platforms that can help them mitigate the lack of air time and walled garden real estate. A year ago, it would have been a safe bet that dollars not spent on linear would shift to digital, but brand safety, fraud and viewability are still challenges in digital media, and there seem to be enough new places for brands to go that digital is a bit stagnant. 

For brands I’m speaking with, OTT is a pricey, confusing and still untested alternative, considered a “broadcast inventory extension” for obvious reasons, but showing promising signs of being able to validate itself from an ROI perspective. Influencers, podcasts, and OOH are all surging too, yet none of these alone are enough to give marketers the scale they need, according to the biggest brands in the country.

The takeaway for any brand trying to reach consumers: rather than fight for space among crowded inventory, refresh your media mix with new platforms that give scale and an engaged audience where you’re out of that fray. 

WHAT’S COOL AGAIN: OOH & AUDIO

Podcasting fits perfectly into content diversification as it’s a key format consumers have turned to as they turn away from TV. Per IAB, marketers will have spent $479 million on podcasts by the end of 2019, a 53 percent jump from 2017. Brands believe that, in the moment of the aural environment, messages resonate when aligned with the right content. 

Further, we’ve come out the other side of mobile growth to realize data and personalization and targeting still can’t always earn you attention in a sea of scrolling (300 feet or more per day now), ad blocking and so on. So the world’s oldest and largest creative canvas – OOH – is once again the shiniest new object to meet consumers on their time and dime, and bring them information, entertainment, utility and value.

To that end, OOH revenue grew 7% in Q3 to nearly $6.4 billion. This figure is a reminder of how big TV is – that amount is roughly how much linear will lose in 2020. So the OOH space continues to heat up as the largest brands, from McDonald’s, Geico, Apple, State Farm, Chevrolet, Amazon, Facebook, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T, and HBO accelerate spend and use. 

Both OOH and Podcasting are seeing technological advancements that will keep them hot in 2020, namely programmatic capabilities that will extend their run as the cool kids on the block, and lead to the emergence of indirect paths to utilization.

Worth noting here: it wasn’t long ago that both audio and OOH were the least interesting media buys available. So while TV may be on the decline, it could be the hottest new platform in just a couple of years. Marketers are telling me that they continually interrogate their own assumptions about media partners, channels and choices as new innovation and efficiency does exist beyond the latest ad-tech play. 

SUCCESS STARTS AND ENDS WITH ATTENTION 

I wrote earlier this year that the cost of consumer attention is ROI. We’re asking consumers to apply their minds to our messages at moments where that isn’t possible. It’s the natural effect of content diversification - as we’re given more options for things to look at, we have less attention to give any particular thing. 

Consider your own TV viewing habits. Are you fully engaged all the time? The old adage that we run to the kitchen during the commercial now fights with the notion that we’re on our phones, passively watching as we scroll Amazon. When we’re scrolling, we’re blind to the ads that are passing through our feeds (for the products we bought weeks ago, and returned). 

Consumer behavior is a moving target, and a tricky one to ever nail down. For that reason, attention has once again captured mindshare across the market. Where can I find engaged, captive audiences, and what is being done to maintain that attention? Those attentive moments are the ones that matter for brands. 

The most interesting brands I speak to all reference a similar theme: there is often innovation hiding in plain sight.

CONCLUSION 

While the growing availability of content and decreasing attention spans makes 2020 out to be a chaotic year to navigate, it’s quite the opposite. There is great reward ahead for brand leaders ready to embrace the unknown and realize the strongest accelerant for marketing success is embracing the disruption by finding balance in the art and science.

Dare to be bold by challenging creativity beyond the creative. Build a media strategy that’s agile and welcomes incorporating platforms that can reach attentive consumers and deliver results at scale. Be OK with trying something new, and that might mean something so-called old that’s newly relevant again. The same goes for failing, if doing so means uncovering  insights on consumer trends or discovering messaging that stood out. At GSTV, we’re bullish about the new year because these trends will challenge brands to think about what’s important to them -- audience, engagement, agility, and delivering on growth outcomes. Here’s to a great year.