Super Bowl Ads The Biggest Waste of Money for Brands?
 Choice of Image - Msnide |
But First Snide's Remarks: After 47 years in the media (Radio, TV, Internet) I am always amazed by those ad agency people who never seem to be able to convince their clients that they need ongoing down-in-the-trenches basic advertising to sell their product, but are able to find budget for Super Bowl spots. I am also amazed that the agency and car execs forget that even if they hit a commercial that generates water-cooler-bla-bla, their job is not over, as is shown in the lack of bumps in sales after the Super Bowl.
As an example I have been trying to get one of the car brands seen on SB to invest in an ongoing brand campaign focused on The Auto Channel's 700,000 monthly viewers who are here for just one thing...to include or remove a manufacturer's model being considered for purchase from their short list. But for more than two years now the brand and agency continue to not have the budget (less than 8 grand a month, 8 grand a month) to reach almost 10 million in market auto shoppers or influential's, WTF...
Bitter grapes you may say, no no its way beyond bitter grapes, as the most senior and experienced automotive web site publisher, it is hard for me to comprehend that an automotive brand exec can still explain away and justify spending millions of their company's/shareholders money to reach a non-targeted omnibus swath of viewers who really don't give a crap about the car being advertised... ahh, but having a Super Bowl spot or two or three on a resume sure looks impressive...oh my.Let me know what you think - msnide@theautochannel.com
Special To The Auto Channel
Performance Marketing Insider
Written by Michael Levanduski
February 9, 2015
For millions of people, the Super Bowl is as much about the advertisements as it is about football. This is especially true for marketers. With the average cost of a 30 second spot during the super bowl raising to about $4.5 Million this year, it just makes sense to wonder what other marketing could be done with that money. Programmatic Ad Platform, Rocketfuel, has done some research to really answer that question.
To start with, they found that for just $3.8 million, a company could buy out every ad impression that is available on all of the major digital ad exchanges during the entire Super bowl. They estimated $1.50 CPM, and 2,542,573,344 total ads being displayed during the four hours that the game was on.
Yes, that’s right. For less than the cost of one 30 second ad spot, a company could essentially buy out the entire Internet!
Of course, that is not the only option. Brands could also buy out every single advertisement that gets displayed on YouTube’s home page. For 11 days! Or maybe you’re a Twitter fan? If so, you can get 37 days of continuous sponsored trending status.
If you’re looking for a more targeted approach, you could opt out to buy up all the ads on all of Turner Networks, which includes TNT.tv, CNN.com, NBA.com, AdultSwim.com and many others.
So, the big question is why on earth do brands shell out millions of dollars for such a brief ad spot? Surely the return on investment must be great, right? As it turns out, this is not actually the case. RocketFuel looked at the conversation improvement rates related to Super Bowl ads and found that there is virtually no bump in sales at all!
While most of us will have little influence on the way major brands spend their ad budgets, we can at least pat ourselves on the back for not being the biggest idiots in marketing.
You can read the full report from Rocket Fuel HERE.
Written by Michael Levanduski
Michael Levanduski is the assistant editor of Performance Marketing Insider, and an experienced freelance writer. He writes content for a wide range of sites in virtually every niche, though he specializes in technical writing as well as creating content for the performance and internet marketing industry. Michael was born in Grand Rapids, MI where he still lives with his wife and three children.
