Super Bowl Disaster!
By admin | February 5, 2007
By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth
Okay, I’m a huge fan of “Da Bears” but their loss to the Colts is not the disaster I’m referring to. Actually even I can’t be too upset about solid leaders like Peyton Manning and Tony Dungy getting the win, but I digress…The disaster I’m referring to is that of Super Bowl advertising. I appreciate a good branding play as much as the next guy…I aslo enjoy excellent creative and actually possess a true love for genuine marketing and advertising genius. That being said, I’m here to tell you that Super Bowl advertising makes no business sense whatsoever in that it cannot be economically justified by any sane method of analysis. In reality Super Bowl ads are far from genius and in fact more closely resemble irresponsible and frivolous action by advertisers. In today’s post I’ll point out the flawed business logic in purchasing Super Bowl advertising and even provide a few suggestions to advertisers for better alternatives…
Okay, let’s do some basic math…A 30-second Super Bowl spot sold for more than $2.6 million dollars (that’s more than $86,000 per second) this year and that’s just for the air time. If you factor in the costs for talent and production it is likely that the total costs for one 30 second commercial could cost between $4 and $5 million dollars. Is this smart business? I think not, but read on and draw your own conclusions…
This years Super Bowl advertisers included Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Izod, Emerald Nuts, Doritos, CareerBuilder.com, Garmin, General Motors, ETrade, Honda, GoDaddy.com, HP, Pepsi, Nationwide Insurance, Kind Pharmaceuticals and Salesgenie.com among others. Anheuser-Busch purchased five different spots purportedly spending more than $25 million dollars in airtime alone.
I don’t know about you but none of the ads I viewed while watching the Super Bowl will positively influence my personal buying decisions. I want you to take a few minutes and ponder the following questions:
1. How would you feel if you were a shareholder of any of the companies that advertised on the Super Bowl? Would you feel that this was a responsible use of funds?
2. How many bottles of Coke, cans of nuts, lists of sales leads, domain names etc. have to be purchased to even come close to breaking even on these type of ad spends?
3. Will you spend your money any differently as a result of these ads? The only thing I’m sure of is that I won’t purchase certain products from some of the advertisers who aired commercials that I thought were ridiculous or offensive. Even if the creative was good I still find it an abuse of shareholder trust to spend corporate funds this foolishly.
For those who would say that Super Bowl ads are not about increasing short-term sales, but are intended to increase brand awareness and mind share I would dispute this thinking as well. There are any number of other venues and mediums that would generate better buzz than a Super Bowl ad…Even if you wanted to buy TV spots, just think of all the targeted cable TV spots that could be purchased with that type of budget…In many markets you can buy a 30 second prime-time cable TV spot for under $200 dollars which means you could run more than 35 ads per day for 365 straight days for the cost of a single Super Bowl ad.
If these corporations really want to generate some positive brand play why not distribute these funds to shareholders or donate the money spent on Super Bowl ads to charity? The reality is that Super Bowl ads are pure ego buys and have nothing to do with rational business investments. If you are a shareholder of any of this year’s advertisers I would encourage you to voice your opinions and hold them accountable for their poor judgment.
Topics: Branding & Identity, Rants, Uncategorized |
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