By Amy Butler
Millions of dollars are spent every year to purchase advertising time during the most-watched sports event of the entire year. I am no advertising expert, but I imagine that marketing executives work long and hard to produce those much-anticipated Super Bowl commercials, doing everything in their power to create the one ad that will stick in everybody’s mind long after they’ve forgotten who won the game.
While I will admit that I laughed at the Oreo commercial where the policeman whispers into a bullhorn, overall I found most of the commercials this year boring at best. I mean, do advertisers really believe this kind of media is effective?
How stupid do they think we are? After the first few disappointing commercials (did you see that Century 21 commercial set at a wedding?), most of the people gathered to watch the game at my house used commercial breaks to get up and refill their plates.
But everything changed for the group in my living room toward the beginning of the third quarter, when the power in the Superdome went out. We sat around waiting for the game to resume, eating some more and making jokes about what it must feel like to be the head electrician on duty at the Superdome.
Just a few minutes into our wait, someone in the room started to check her Twitter feed. One of the first things she noticed was an ad. It was another Oreo ad, a picture of an Oreo cookie in the dark with the tag line, “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark.”
We were collectively in awe. Just a few minutes into a totally unplanned and completely unprecedented electricity blackout during the Super Bowl, marketing professionals had an ad created and posted. Some news outlets the next day reported that that ad was retweeted almost 15,000 times.
I watched that rapid response, an advertiser seizing the moment and making marketing history, and I couldn’t help but think about the church. It seems to me that many of us work incredibly hard at strategizing approaches to making the church relevant.
We read books and attend conferences and engage in endless conversations with our colleagues trying to figure out how we can make the crowds of unchurched people outside our doors walk the aisles and become regular tithers. I can’t count how many times I have heard church people lament, “If only we could get some young people in here!”
Adopting some of the best traditional marketing strategies out there, we’ve tried everything. Espresso machines in the lobby, church online, culturally timed and slickly packaged sermon series, all of them very nice but so many times an effort to play catch up with what’s going on around us.
And in our efforts, I am afraid that we’ve turned the church into a dinosaur begging to be relevant by giving consumers exactly what we think they want, hoping beyond hope that it will work this time and hoards of people will rush to church in response.
I can’t help but wonder if the unchurched masses respond to our efforts in the same way the folks in my living room responded to those Super Bowl commercials last week: “Seriously? How stupid do they think we are?”
I think maybe those of us in the church could learn a thing or two from Oreo’s marketing team. What that team did exceptionally well last week was take an unplanned turn of events and see it as an opportunity to remind people of what they already know: that if there’s one thing we all need, it’s Oreos dunked in milk. What we witnessed in that Oreo ad was this truth: high empowerment plus high situational awareness equals agility.
We know our world needs the gospel; it’s a message too good to pass up. Among church professionals this conviction is not in dispute. But the reality is that modern life is changing, and it’s changing at a speed to which the modern church cannot keep up. How do we stay engaged in the world around us and empower each other to respond with the gospel? How can we create agile churches?
I don’t know the answers to all the questions about the church that arose for me while I watched the Super Bowl last week. But I do know that plodding along doing the same old thing, paralyzed with the weight of the way we’ve always done it, is just not working for the church anymore. I believe somebody somewhere is surely poised and ready, empowered to respond to the realities of ministry in this day and age, and somebody will; the message we have to share is too compelling.
Whatever that response will be, I’m watching my Twitter feed carefully because I don’t want to miss it!