NEW YORK — Two hundred thousand hits online. Fifteen seconds of fame on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” on post-Super Bowl Monday. A TV audience of about 93 million for the introduction of a new logo.
Such are the reasons Izod, for one, felt the exorbitant cost of mounting a TV commercial during Super Bowl XLI on Feb. 4 paid off.
“Every penny we spent was worth it,” contended Michael I. Kelly, executive vice president of marketing at corporate parent Phillips-Van Heusen. He did not specify the total budget for the spot; CBS charged an average of $2.6 million for 30 seconds of commercial time during the Super Bowl. Marketing executives have put production costs for ads aired during the annual sports extravaganza at $500,000 to $2 million, depending on the size of the advertiser.
The 93 million viewers who took in the Super Bowl were considerably more wide-ranging than Izod’s 25- to 35-year-old consumer ideal (“who, by the way, are waiting for commercials to come on,” Kelly said). But more than half the average 1.3 million adult viewers nightly of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” or 731,000, are typically ages 24 through 39, based on recent Nielsen ratings, as quoted by PVH. On Feb. 5, comedian Jon Stewart introduced a segment on global warming with an excerpt from Izod’s colorful, slick, fantastical Super Bowl spot showcasing active models in activewear, by stating deadpan: “The earth is warming, but when casual men’s wear can do it (pause) you know something’s happening.”
Stewart was referring to the commercial’s digital melt from snowy scenes in Iceland to sun-splashed climes in the Bahamas — a moment conceived to convey the world as Izod’s (and its customer’s) oyster. Though the commercial was not intended as a comment on global warming, Kelly was not disenchanted with Stewart’s take. “Outdoors, travel and sports are the arenas of pop culture where the Izod customer gets messages about various brands,” Kelly said. “A Jon Stewart ‘placement’ is number two after the Super Bowl,” he added with a straight face. “When you talk about pop culture, Jon Stewart is it.”
Next up for Izod, which Kelly said did about $1 billion in sales at retail: a spring campaign for the PerformX collection, breaking in March, that will feature 29-year-old model Tyler Denk, winner of the most recent edition of CBS’s “The Amazing Race.” (“We loved his golf swing and his smile,” Kelly said.) A summer salvo, surfacing in April, will highlight images of Izod swimwear, polo shirts — and model Tori — playfully caressing and kissing a dolphin underwater, in a sun-drenched turquoise tank in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
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Albeit for a significantly smaller audience, the upcoming campaigns, like the winter ads preceding them, will aim to imbue the Izod brand with a sense of being colorful, fun and energetic and one to be worn year-round.
Till then, Izod will content itself with a Super Bowl afterlife that so far has produced 200,000-plus hits on sites like YouTube, iFilm and AOL Video, and blog speak at Gizmodo, for instance, according to Kelly.
With the brand’s image primary in the winter campaign — which kicked off in 1,300 movie theaters across the country in November — Izod has used its current ads to introduce the first of its new logo marks. The logo spotlighted near the end of the Super Bowl commercial is an interlocking block I and Z, in a serif style, that will appear in the brand’s Luxury Sport and Black Label Golf collections. A smaller version of that mark, lying between two laurel leaves, will be applied to Izod’s Classix range as a crest and will be embroidered on an exclusive group of products for Macy’s.
Izod jeans will sport an outlined image of the interlocking block letters, while the brand’s PerformX, Women’s Movement and Xtreme Function Golf lines will have a streamlined, sans serif version of the interlocking I and Z with two black squares to mark the top and bottom of a white letter I.
The logos will appear across all of Izod’s marketing media — ads, packaging, in-store and online — beginning with spring items and, like all of the marketing for PVH’s 30 brands and subbrands, they were created in-house by a group of 20 people, whom Kelly dubbed “our petri dish of an agency.”