Profiles in Excellence 

Perhaps you remember the first Apple Computer commercial that ran during the 1984 Super Bowl.

A woman in bright red shorts carrying a sledgehammer is running through a crowd of people all dressed in gray prisoner-type clothes shuffling along into a movie theater where a man on a movie screen drones on and on.  The woman, who is being pursued by uniformed armed guards, stops and swings the hammer like a shot put and throws it at the screen. The screen is obliterated, the people look stunned and a voice-over says “On January 24 Apple Computer introduces Macintosh, and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”

This was one of hundreds of Super Bowl ads that undergraduate Lori Christians Herzog watched as part of a summer research project with Dr. Chuck Tomkovick, a UW-Eau Claire professor of management and marketing. In all she viewed three decades of Super Bowl commercials. The Apple commercial is one she still remembers nearly a decade later.

“I spent whole days watching the ads and analyzing them,” said Herzog, who is a marketing researcher for MarketTools Inc. in St. Louis Park, Minn. “I would record when they aired, where the ad was positioned, whether celebrities or cartoon characters were used, the ad metrics and the investment of the ad, among other things.”

Determining what made Super Bowl ads successful was a project that Tomkovick had wanted to research for years. The Super Bowl is viewed by nearly 140 million Americans and 1 billion viewers worldwide. Using the Super Bowl to debut new, creative and expensive commercials now is a tradition, said Tomkovick, who with Dr. Rama Yelkur, an associate professor of management and marketing at UW-Eau Claire completed the first Super Bowl advertising effectiveness study of its kind.

Herzog published three papers with Tomkovick and Yelkur, including one in the Journal of Marketing Communications.

“It’s a prestigious European journal and has been frequently cited since,” Tomkovick said.
Additionally, Herzog won a first-place award at Student Research Day in 2000 with her poster on Super Bowl advertising.

“This was after working hard on another poster in 1999 and commenting, ‘Next year we are going to win.’ She was determined to do so,” Tomkovick said.

As a result of the research, Herzog was able to attend two national conferences, one in New York and one in Montana. Funding she received from the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs helped make this possible.

The experience was a powerful motivator, Herzog said. “It’s the main reason I am in marketing research today,” she said.