Super Bowl Radar: Tham Khai Meng

What’s the best Super Bowl pre-ad campaign you’ve seen this year?

Dorito’s Crash the Super Bowl. Every year, I get more and more excited to see the latest iteration. I’m bummed that this will be the last year of the campaign, but on the other hand, I hear murmurings that this year’s will be the funniest and most original. Ideas can come from anywhere, and in Dorito’s case, they come from passionate fans. The user-generated bandwagon may be getting a little crowded now, but as long as we get to be entertained by the great ideas, who cares where they come from?

And your all-time favourite Super Bowl ad?

It has to be Budweiser Frogs from 1995. This is a real classic film that became a cultural phenomenon overnight. It’s such a simple and brilliant idea. Three frogs named Bud, Weis and Er. It got into the zeitgeist of a whole generation, and beyond. The greatest flattery is when your work gets spoofed in popular culture. In The Simpsons episode, The Springfield Files, for instance, three frogs get eaten by a crocodile who growls, “Coors!”

How will you be celebrating the Big Game this year?

I’m opting for the classic American Super Bowl tradition. Nothing fancy. I’ll be with my friends, family, the dog on the couch (which means a guest is going to have to sit on the floor), chowing down on wings, pizza, and a six-pack of my favorite brew. And like a true modern fan, of course I’ll have multiple screens up. Watching, texting, tweeting, eating, shouting. And I’m a big Peyton Manning fan, so Go Broncos!

Which will you be using during the game - Facebook, Instagram or Twitter?

Twitter. It’s become a crucial part of the culture of watching a major event. The power going out in New Orleans at the Super Bowl a few years ago gave us some of the funniest, most original reactions and social media content. Twitter is a fun way to see a whole gamut of people’s instant reactions to the ads - what they found funny, boring, offensive, confusing, uplifting.

What’s the most inspiring thing about the Super Bowl and why?

The scale of it all is epic. Last year, 114 million people in the US alone watched the Super Bowl, the most ever. And it was Facebook and Twitter’s biggest Big Game ever, too. There were 1.5 million tweets just about the ads alone last year—never mind the game itself or the half-time show.

The sheer consumerism is just incredible. Just think about it, when else are brands communicating with this massive number of people instantly and all at once? And even those who are only joining in the conversation on social media are engaging at incredible scale. When you realise how many eyes are on an ad at the same exact time, the world over… Wow. Makes you wonder about the human race.

What’s the most significant change you’ve witnessed in marketing at the Super Bowl since you started watching it?

It’s unfortunate, but it has become rare to see truly ground-breaking ads driven by a great idea during the Super Bowl. In recent years, the ads have become a little too safe and too bland, I think. These days, mould-breaking ads at the Super Bowl are as rare as hen’s teeth. What has happened in recent years is the idea has been usurped by the product which is now king. What happened to great storytelling I wonder?

If there were one thing you could change about the advertising industry during the Super Bowl, what would it be?

Less product, more ideas. There’s so much pizza and beer on the screen. And on the table in front of the TV. How about some nice tasty ideas as toppings on those pizzas? Let’s make a rule that the commercials can’t be longer than 30 seconds - like Twitter with a limit of 140 characters. That might make those tasty ideas surface and connect in a way the audience will remember and act.

Tell us about one of your personal/professional Super Bowl experiences that most people won’t know…

A couple of years ago, I headed out to my friend Jeremy’s place in Pennsylvania, just 100 miles west from Manhattan but a world away. I drove through dense, suburban New Jersey and finally arrived in what resembles the American heartland more than the nearby New York City area. There were single family houses on large manicured lawns, pickup trucks everywhere and even a working corn farm.

I walked around the back of the house and entered through the open patio door. No one locks up around there—they all just go in and out of each other’s houses with a hearty “hello!” Jeremy had a few of his friends over—a couple of writers (like Jeremy), a general contractor, and some guy who looked like a lumberjack. It turns out he was a college coach, but he had grown up felling trees in rural Pennsylvania; I wasn’t all wrong.

What made it memorable were these wildly different guys who had just coalesced into a group of friends because they lived nearby. That night, they were divided into two camps —one for each team—and at one point, they set up the rule that every successful extra point must be celebrated by a chugged beer. It was profane, competitive, sometimes messy (pigs-in-blankets were used as projectiles as the night wore on), and fun. Just like the Super Bowl.