Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Dalibor Šumiga, PromoSapiens
Another Super Bowl is over – a completely insignificant event on this side of the big pond, unless you are involved in marketing.
The feast of American football attracts approximately 190 million viewers and is the largest sports event, not only from the perspective of sport, but also business. An ad spot during the Super Bowl costs approximately $ 5 million for approximately 30 seconds of exposure of your brand to a potential audience of 190 million souls… Unlike conventional TV events, where in many cases the audience during commercials makes a quick trip to the refrigerator or the bathroom, the Super Bowl is also a holiday of advertising and a place where you can see the most creative marketing works of the world’s leading brands. The million dollar question (or better yet a $5m question) – how much does it actually pay off to advertise on the Super Bowl?
If the big brands are there, then it must be worth something…
There is an interesting saying, and I apologize in advance for the vulgarity: “Eat shit, a billion flies can’t be wrong…” The fact that big brands are at the Super Bowl does not necessarily mean that it’s profitable, but that someone has enough money to pump up its image, and that will be the main argument for all the supporters of Super Bowl advertising – “we pump our image through it.” Yeah, but for how long?
Several hours during the game? No one will rush out of the house during the game to buy the advertised product immediately after seeing the ad, unless they lack chips or beer, but even that scenario is highly unlikely.
Before the game? There is a space there actually, because advertisers do a build-up before the match, showing the ads that will be aired during the Super Bowl. But just look at that theatre of the absurd – the ads that will be televised during the Super Bowl are first shown – online(!).
After the game? It would be nice to measure this data – how long after the game do viewers remember an ad, and their intention to buy a product?
Is it better to be present in the buyer’s subconscious during a single game, or during 365 days of the year?
How much does a Super Bowl ad cost?
For the $5m price tag of a Super Bowl ad, you can buy the following:
- 2.1 million app installs
- 15 million clicks through search engine advertising
- 250 million Facebook video views, of which 71 million views of over 75% of the video
- 7.7 million Facebook clicks (likes, comments, shares, post clicks)
- 8-10 days of YouTube’s masthead: daily lease costs ca. $500.000 to $625.000. The last time I wanted to activate this service for a client it was unavailable in Croatia, but that was a year ago. However, even then I received a confirmation that the price of this service wouldn’t be cheap in Croatia as well.
If you still haven’t fainted from these figures, read on…
Research on the effectiveness of advertising during the Super Bowl showed that only a third (ca. 39%) of the advertisers can expect return on investment. I don’t have the exact data, but I assume that this is an explicit research – meaning, classical asking of questions – that already proved unreliable because aware answers from respondents don’t reflect the real state of things. If you ask me would I buy a brand new Mercedes at 50% off, I’ll probably say “YES”, but that doesn’t mean that I will actually buy it.
Another important information related to the Super Bowl: 73% of viewers are the so called second-screeners, which means that they have in their hands a smartphone or some other device which further pulls the focus away from the events taking place on the big screen.
It would certainly be good to hear the arguments in favour of Super Bowl advertising, but according to the data that we could see, you could say that Super Bowl advertising, as in many other cases, is more a game of marketing egos and irrational spending of marketing budgets just because you can, rather than good advertising business. Of course, whoever has the money has the legitimate right to spend it as they want, but it’s not correct and professional to cite Super Bowl ads, as well as some advertisements that we see here in our region, as an example of superior marketing. The great Mr. Ogilvy, whom a large number of marketers like to cite, said the famous words: “It isn’t creative if it doesn’t sell…”