How did Jeff Bezos team up with Cardi B and Gordon Ramsay to change Amazon’s business strategy? 
The Silicon Valley CEO was featured alongside the celebrities in this year’s top-rated Super Bowl commercial, where Alexa loses her voice and is replaced by a cadre of celebrities. When tasked with creating content to win the world’s biggest popularity contest, Amazon dropped the company’s usual data-driven approach. Here’s the story of how this led them to create viral content, and how it can help you engage your clients.
Amazon’s executive creative director, Michael Boychuk, was a featured presenter at the Leaders Sport Business Summit NYC 2018 on May 22. He spoke about how Amazon’s marketing team builds engaging content, and why he was surprised that the commercial they created won the Super Bowl this year.
Amazon is one of the biggest tech giants in the country, and its success is arguably fueled by its businesses reliance on metrics. So why did Boychuk, a marketing executive who characterizes himself as a creative thinker, join a firm that is widely recognized for making its decision based on data? Because he recognized that there is another driver behind Amazon’s success – their company commitment to ”customer centricity.”
“What's interesting to me is that everyone always puts this label of ‘data driven’ on Amazon,” Boychuk said. “Well it's true, I mean we love data of course, how could we not?”
But, Boychuk explained, if he had to summarize what Amazon stands for in just a few words, it would be its focus on client relationship management, which every employee is trained to uphold. “Every great agency has the customer at the very heart of what they do in planning and creating,” he said.
Boychuk was tasked to build engaging content for Amazon, and to make its Super Bowl commercial a global hit. He knew he was not going to be able to accomplish this using the company’s practice of relying on analytics. “This customer centricity was really the excuse to make something emotional and fun,” he said.
I will explain how Boychuk introduced a unique strategy to build engaging content for Amazon, but first let’s look at how he and his team came up with an idea that went viral.
What Alexa did to win the Super Bowl for Amazon
On February 5, 2018, the morning after the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl XXXIX championship game, Boychuk received unexpected news – he won the Super Bowl – the USA Today annual Super Bowl ad meter, that is.
Every year, online volunteers around the world select the contest’s winner by rating the big game’s ads on a score of 1 to 10. The highly coveted airtime is watched intently around the world, and the television slots carry the potential for enormous positive brand exposure.
“After five months of having every minute of my life living and breathing a piece of creative,” he said, it was a complete surprise to wake up and learn that the ad had gone viral around the world.
In fact, when he and his team began work on this in July 2017, he said, “we set this goal of being in the top five.” This objective was chosen as an aspirational target. With so many great contenders in this year’s advertisement lineup, Boychuk said, he convinced himself that Amazon was not going to win.
Yet against difficult odds, Alexa won marketing’s greatest showdown. So how did they do it?
The winning commercial tells the story of Amazon Echo’s virtual assistant, commonly known as “Alexa,” getting sick and losing her voice.
The beginning of the commercial features Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, being alerted frantically that Alexa needs to be replaced because she lost her voice. Subsequent scenes then run through everyday settings where seemingly average people try to use Alexa for normal household tasks. But, to the users’ surprise, their commands receive comic responses from an eclectic celebrity lineup – Gordon Ramsay, Rebel Wilson, Cardi B and Sir Anthony Hopkins.
Amazon’s internal marketing team partnered with London agency Lucky Generals to come up with content that would stand out. The project was to create engaging creative content using a unique approach, Boychuk said. “What I love is big rich ideas that you can't pin down that don't really seem like they have a home,” he explained.
How Jimmy Fallon helped Amazon
Before they began to discuss ideas, Boychuk explained, he knew that his team would have to do three things.
The content would need to follow a narrative. Seeking to do something different from the usual format, during production, Boychuk did not let his team refer to the project as a commercial. Rather, he explained, he insisted they say “we’re making a film, we’re making content.”
They needed to find a way to make the content both relevant and funny for customers of varying demographics. That is, they needed to use a customer-centric approach, clearly communicating the different ways Alexa helps divergent viewers in their daily lives.
Boychuk said it was important to deliver the information in a way that helps the customer understand how it applies to common real-life concerns, like childcare and paying their mortgages.
Third, Amazon’s team wanted to keep the audience engaged by alternating the tone of each scene as the content plot progressed. “No one wants to see 90 seconds of a joke that's really loud or really soft continuously,” Boychuk said.
With this in mind, there was one idea that quickly emerged – what would happen if Alexa lost her voice?
The team started to build a commercial that, while showing viewers how the device can be used day-to-day, followed a comical storyline that conveyed a clear message: Alexa is irreplaceable.
But coming up with this idea wasn’t the hard part, Boychuk explained. Selecting the right combination of celebrities for the storyline was the most difficult part. In search of the perfect cast for the production of the video, Amazon considered “celebrity matrix” variations.
“We had this idea of these energy peaks and valleys throughout the spot,” Boychuk explained, “and we wanted to make sure that the celebrities would fit into that when they were in their natural state, being themselves.”
After a long process, they were able to settle on the first three celebrities. “You can see the way Gordon Ramsay comes in hot and swearing, and then Rebel who is kind of quiet and awkwardly seductive,” Boychuk said. “And of course there's Sir Anthony, who just exudes this creepy all-seeing, all-knowing element.” But Boychuk knew they still needed a fourth star.
“My dream of the Super Bowl has always been like the dream of a surfer, to find the perfect wave, to find the perfect celebrity talent,” he said jokingly.
With deadlines approaching and pressure mounting, they found themselves struggling to find the last celebrity to complete the matrix. After pinning countless celebrity photos to the whiteboard in his office, Boychuk recalled, he realized that his search for the final star led him to create a “Beautiful Mind” matrix of headshots.
“And then December 20, 2017, the universe spoke up and cracked me in the head, and it happened.”
Boychuk found the missing piece that would turn the commercial into a hit – all thanks to this late night comedy show:
After watching the first minute of Jimmy Fallon’s interview with Cardi B, he knew she was the perfect fit."I mean close your eyes and just listen to that, her voice is amazing,” he said. “She fit in really perfectly into this mix. You can just see it. It feels weird, which is what I really wanted.”
After one final ”gut check,” where he received enthusiastic texts from his daughter after asking her if she knew Cardi B, he was sure they were on the right track. By cleverly featuring this unique and funny combination of celebrities, Amazon succeeded in engaging a diverse group of viewers.
Marianne Brunet is a financial markets analyst at Advisor Perspectives.
Read more articles by Marianne Brunet
The Silicon Valley CEO was featured alongside the celebrities in this year’s top-rated Super Bowl commercial, where Alexa loses her voice and is replaced by a cadre of celebrities. When tasked with creating content to win the world’s biggest popularity contest, Amazon dropped the company’s usual data-driven approach. Here’s the story of how this led them to create viral content, and how it can help you engage your clients.
