Competitive Intelligence

Super Bowl Ads are for Suckers

Timothy Noah at Slate.com cites a Broadcasting & Cable magazine experiment that showed the best way to reach your target market during the Super Bowl is to spend that $2.4 mil trying to counter-program against it:

It asked an ad agency called Starcom to enter Nielsen ratings data from last year's Super Bowl time slot into a computer to see whether the computer could "beat" a Super Bowl ad buy. The average price of a Super Bowl ad last year was $2.30 per 30-second spot. (The price this year climbed to $2.40 per 30-second spot.) Starcom fed that into the computer, too. Then it set about trying to see whether, by "spending" the same amount on counter-programming that other networks and cable channels ran against the Super Bowl, the computer could exceed the Super Bowl's slice of the audience that advertisers care about: adults between the ages of 18 and 49.

It wasn't even close. The computer's Super Bowl ad buy reached 29 percent of adults 18-49; the computer's counter-programming ad buy reached 47.3 percent of adults 18-49. In essence, buying ad time on various TV shows that were supposedly going unwatched--because "everybody" was watching the Super Bowl--would have enabled advertisers to reach 60 percent more potential customers.

Within the advertising industry, there appears to be an unshakeable belief that Super Bowl ad buys are justified because the ads have a much greater impact than TV commercials usually do. Viewers know that advertisers use the Super Bowl to show off their creativity, and so they've come to regard the Super Bowl as, among other things, a kind of mini-film festival. Some polls actually show that more people watch the Super Bowl for the ads than for the game itself.

And later an indictment of the ad industry itself:

So why do advertising agencies tout the wonderfulness of advertising on the Super Bowl? I suspect the answer is that, while the Super Bowl may not be an especially smart forum in which to sell the advertisers' products, it's a great forum for selling the ad agency itself. Ads that attract attention to themselves may not sell consumer goods, but they do provide a wonderful forum for ad agencies to show the world how creative they can be. And it's a lot easier for an ad agency to purchase one very expensive ad slot than it is to match that fat commission through the purchase of hundreds of ads. Add these considerations together and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that ad agencies are driven, perhaps unconsciously, to make suckers of their clients. The clients are receptive because having an ad on the Super Bowl confers an undeniable glamour. But glamour doesn't pay the bills.

Ford, Bud, Volvo, Pepsi, Ameriquest, and most bizarrely of all, Silestone...

Suckers! Every one... plus, Seth Stevensen breaks it down for us on the ads themselves, on NPR.

- Arik