And here we are, the day after Super Bowl XLIX. It’s back to the grind for the social media talking heads, the digital marketing gurus and the PR pitch artists. And that means it’s back to telling everyone that advertising doesn’t work.

Except today, all we’ll talk about are which television commercials were our favorite yesterday.

(We aren’t a bright bunch sometimes.)

Brand advertising, especially that which is buoyed by a major media spend like that offered for Super Bowl commercials, is still the fastest, most effective way to reach a large number of consumers. If that advertising is done well, it can also have the best return on investment. Why else would companies spend an average of $4.5 million per 30-seconds of air time? And that’s just for the media buy. That doesn’t include the cost of production.

Sure, there are plenty that drop the money just for status or buzz who don’t see a good return. They don’t connect the product benefits to the audience in a way that motivates trial or consideration. You probably don’t remember who they are 10 seconds after the ad is over.

Budweiser is cute with its Clydesdales and puppies, but the “awwwww” moment of the Super Bowl isn’t likely to sell a drop of beer. In its defense, that’s not what Budweiser is trying to accomplish. They want to connect the simple values of America — trust, loyalty, friendship — to their brand so those who respect those values might choose Budweiser because of the connection. And they do that consistently in most of their campaign communications.

But the ones that relay the value or unique selling proposition in a fun way can drive buzz and business. One of my favorites from last night is Loctite:

You come away remembering the name of the brand and understanding that it glues stuff on almost any surface. That’s pretty solid.

And a bazillion eyeballs saw that spot last night. That’s huge for a brand most of us hadn’t heard of before yesterday.

In our passion for social media, our assertiveness toward proving more definitive value with pay-per-click buys and our (correct) assertion that most companies don’t have the money to do brand advertising well or at a scale, we’ve forgotten that communicating is still a simple process. And that in most circumstances, television still reaches more eyeballs.

No, they may not be the most relevant eyeballs, but I’ll take a million watchers, a fraction of whom might be relevant to the 4,000 folks who follow a company on Twitter every day of the week.

Where the social media evangelists prove themselves to be charlatans is when they say things like, “Advertising is dead,” or “No one pays attention to ads anymore.” What they need to say is, “With strong advertising creative, we can drive people to our social or digital channels where we can engage them more meaningfully, capture more information about them and perhaps illustrate to them we are a company worth investing time and purchases in.”

That doesn’t mean advertising doesn’t have it’s pitfalls, too. Without “Holy Smokes!” messages there, you won’t get people to your digital channels. But to use one medium without the other is performing marketing in incomplete fashion.

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