Ad Age recently came out with an article stating “80% of Super Bowl Ads Don’t Help Sales.” If the objective of advertisements is to sell products or ideas, why do companies still bother with the showy commercials?
Let us start with some facts:
- · Fact 1: An average Super Bowl ad cost four million dollars in 2014. That’s just for the 30-second spot. That does not account for production cost
- · Fact 2: Three-fourths of viewers see these commercials as entertainment, not as a medium to sell.
- · Fact 3: The cost of an ad in these games has gone up 58% since 2001.
- · Fact 4: There is an average of 70 commercials plus per game, making the total advertising air time 35 to 45 minutes.
- · Fact 5: An annual advertising budget for a big business can be around two billion dollars, and that’s the companies that are spending a lot. Those companies spend 20% of their budget on this ad (again, just for the spot).
In theory, Super Bowl ads are set up to fail. They’re expensive, they’re competitive, and they don’t even show profit for the amount invested in them. Why would companies still bother with them?
Well, who had commercials that aired in the latest Super Bowl? We have Toyota, Doritos, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Microsoft, and many more. What do all of these companies have in common?
They have a lot of money.
That’s right. According to the Fortune Global 500 list of2013, 60% of the companies listed are in the top 500 countries in the world, and that’s not even going in depth with facts and figures.
My theory is that the Super Bowl in the advertising world is equivalent to your best friend’s second aunt’s cousin, twice removed, posting pictures of their vacation to Jamaica or their new car on Facebook.
Super Bowl Ads are used to show off.
The sad fact is that the world does not talk about what the most effective Super Bowl ad is. They talk about the funniest, the most shocking, and most entertaining commercials of the night.
That, my friends, is why companies still invest their time in the Super Bowl. Not for money, but for the fame. They invest their money for the chance at becoming viral, or in today’s market, still relevant. With an average of 111 million viewers per game, according to TheDrum, it is not an investment that will lead to profit, but an investment that will hopefully lead to popularity.
But, as we can all see, not every company is interested in long-term endeavors.
If these commercials keep going down the path of viral expectations, the Super Bowl will no longer be the successful show case of proper marketing as it has been for the past number of years.
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