Ship Your Pants and Big Gas Savings put Kmart on the viral video map this past spring. The ads were playful and irreverent.
On November 15th, the world was introduced to a more risque and polarizing side of Kmart — its "Show Your Joe" spot (above), lovingly nicknamed "Jingle Balls" on the social web. Some consumers were outraged — calling the ad "offensive" and "filth" — while others found it to be genius and hilarious, deeming it the best ad of the season.
Let's look at how Kmart's three recent ads compare based on YouTube performance:
"Ship My Pants" — 20,344,698 views. 93,630 Likes and 3,790 Dislikes: 24.7 Likes for every Dislike.
"Big Gas Savings" — 6,250,945 views. 26,583 Likes and 1,312 Dislikes: 20.2 Likes for every Dislike
"Show Your Joe" — 16,779,213 views. 64,473 Likes and 3,932 Dislikes: 16.4 Likes for every Dislike.
It's clear that "Show Your Joe" is the most controversial of Kmart's three big ads this year, with a higher ratio of "Dislikes" on YouTube than the other two videos. It appears clever plays on words — even if there's foul language — are more fair game than hunky pelvic thrusting.
YouTube views of "Show Your Joe"
Internet users have spent the equivalent of 26 years watching "Show Your Joe." It's driven 1,613 subscriptions to the channel and 93,916 shares to social media. In the past 30 days, "Show Your Joe" has a sentiment score of 64 on Topsy; for context, Dove's "Real Beauty Sketches" has a sentiment score of 71 and Volvo's Jean-Claude Van Damme spot has a sentiment score of 66. The ad got people talking, but it's hard to say whether it got people buying.

Kmart seems to have isolated a core, conservative customer base. The brand's social media team has been quite busy on Twitter since the video launched, sending more than 500 @-reply tweets to the effect of We regret if you found it to be inappropriate. That was not our intent. We hope you'll have a happy holiday. or Thanks for your feedback. This is a playful way to spread holiday cheer. We regret if it wasn't your style. Kudos to Kmart for addressing everyone individually, but let's not forget that just 16% of American adults are on Twitter, so the acknowledged tweeters represent a small fraction of those offended.
Kmart's three envelope-pushing ads of 2013 were created by DraftFCB, but they beg the question — is it worth it to be so ballsy? Do the numbers justify the risk of alienating consumers?

Advertising Benchmark Index assesses the efficacy of ads, and its most basic premise is that advertising should, among other things, pitch a product. ABI scores an ad based on 14 variables, including "message," "call to action" and "likability." Virality, however, is not on the list, so according to ABI, a popular ad could nab you tons of earned media and reach, without being a "good" ad. Gary Getto of ABI told Mashable that "Show Your Joe" performed "well below average" compared with all the ads in ABI's database. It seems many people watch the Kmart and didn't realize that A) it was an ad and B) that it was an ad for Kmart. "The brand does not appear until late in the ad, and by then we've laughed and aren't paying much attention," Getto wrote in an email to Mashable.
While it's unclear yet if the ads led to conversions, it's safe to say that they had an impact at the top of the marketing funnel, where awareness is the goal. Though the brand didn't appear until the end of the ad and thus ranked poorly poorly in terms of effectiveness, the controversial nature of the ad put it in the mainstream media, where it was made pretty clear that this was, in fact, a Kmart ad. Just take a look at a few media headlines:
Kmart Goes Balls Out for Christmas Commercial (Fashionista.com)
Kmart Hunks Play 'Jingle Bells' With Their Junk in Crazy Christmas Ad (AdWeek)
Kmart's 'Jingle Bells' Ad Has Legs (Mashable)
Kmart's 'Jingle Bells' ad goes viral, sparks One Million Moms protest (L.A. Times)
Kmart Holiday commercial for Joe Boxer sparks outrage online (New York Daily News)
Another assessor of YouTube ads, Unruly Media, does consider sharability and virality, and its list of the most-shared ads of the year include those video ads you've seen on Facebook, Twitter and even Mashable. Unruly's list of the best ads of the year emerged in November, before "Show Your Joe" reached its full potential, and in the current list of the 100 most-shared ads of the past 365 days, Kmart's "Ship My Pants" ranks #5, "Show Your Joe" ranks #11 and "Big Gas Savings" hit #62. It seems that irreverence garners eyeballs.
Sharing of Show Your Joe, per Unruly
ABI's top-ranked ad of 2013 was a Subway commercial, Unruly's top ad is the Geico Hump Day ad. Which kind of ad most successfully drives conversion and revenues? It's hard to say. While "Show Your Joe" created the most buzz this year, it doesn't look like Kmart's two previous viral ads had any tangible impact at the point of sale. Kmart's same-store sales fell 2.1% in the second quarter (when "Big Gas Savings" and "Ship Your Pants" launched) and dropped the same 2.1% in the third quarter, when there was no such viral ad, suggesting that the ads had no effect on sales. We won't know Q4 performance until 2014, and Kmart declined to be interviewed or share any metrics for this piece.
Bill Kiss, Sears Holdings' chief digital marketing officer, says the ads are indeed helping the brand and letting Kmart tell a "different story." He says social media engagements around the brand have spiked dramatically since the ads started running.
It seems clear that it indeed drove awareness — whether you liked the ad or not, you probably have been thinking more about Kmart in the past five weeks than in the five weeks prior. We'll have to wait until earnings reports come out to know whether Kmart's Q4 sales are up and to assess whether "Show Your Joe" drove conversions. In the meantime, Kmart's social media team has been quite busy, putting out the flames for Jingle Ball-gate, as well as the company's decision to open at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving day to maximize revenues, since Black Friday was especially late this year.
But as the adage goes, there's no such thing as bad press.
Would you rather have a controversial ad or none at all? Tell us in the comments.
Homepage image: YouTube/Kmart