Lachky: No Super Bowl for 'Dude'

Wassup with Bud Light’s Numbers for ‘Dude’?
Dude, have you heard? Bud Light and agency DDB, Chicago, have come up with a potential sequel to 2000’s “Wassup?” campaign. If by some chance you haven’t seen them yet, creative for the ads features a single line of dialogue, “dude,” which is repeated in various tones to express different emphases. Getting slammed in the privates by a turnstyle elicits one “dude,” while nudging a coworker to view an attractive woman prompts another. Bud Light owner Anheuser-Busch loosed the first Dude ads on the Internet during Thanksgiving and then moved them to TV in late December. Based on reports in the media, the ads seem to be being received well. But is there any way to measure the buzz? Bob Lachky, chief creative officer at A-B said the ads have gotten 11 million views on YouTube, Break, MSN, MySpace and BudLight.com but “It’s hard to discern a real hard and fast view number because of the pass-along factor.”
Nevertheless, Nielsen BuzzMetrics (which like Brandweek, is a unit of Nielsen Co.), gave it a shot. BuzzMetrics polled 245,863,398 blogs and compared Dude’s performance with other recent Bud and Bud Light ads, like “Spot” and “Great Apes,” the two ads that ran in last year’s Super Bowl. Research showed that so far, Dude has a ways to go to catch up with hose ads, which were mentioned by .0025% of all blogs right after the Super Bowl. Dude has only gotten one fifth of that buzz so far. Despite the calculation that Super Bowl placement equals big online buzz, Lachky said there are no plans for a Dude ad during this year’s big game: “I don’t know at this stage of the game based on the pretesting for the Super Bowl if it will do as well as the work that has a total surprise factor and rug pull. There’s kind of a fine line for the formula we look at for the Super Bowl and I’m not sure that would be the proper place.”