From a scantily clad woman lying in bed covered with Doritos to Betty White eating a Snickers bar to improve her performance in a game of football, the Super Bowl has long been the biggest day of the year for advertising.
And at $3.5 million per spot, Super Bowl ads are the most expensive and sought-after commercial time on TV.
Did I mention that price is for 30 seconds of airtime? Beyond that, companies still need to pay for filming and producing their commercials, which runs the total investment upwards to $5 million.
Companies investing this colossal amount of money in commercial time are doing so not only in an attempt to reach a massive audience, but also because this is one of the only times of the year when consumers actually look forward to watching TV ads.
“The venue not only delivers a vast audience, it delivers a captive audience that often pays more attention to the commercials than the game itself,” said CareerBuilder’s chief marketing officer Richard Castellini at a Marketing Masters Luncheon Seminar last March.
But now that we live in a digital age, with a variety of new social media outlets competing for people’s attention, companies need to ask themselves: Do Super Bowl commercials really boost sales?
Well, it just depends.
Go Daddy, an Internet domain registrar and web hosting company, is the prime example of a company reaping the benefits from conducting an expensive and ostentatious advertising campaign during the Super Bowl.
Go Daddy began airing sexually suggestive ads during the Super Bowl in 2004, resulting in the company being propelled from relatively unknown to a household name.
“Back in 2004 [when the company released its very first Super Bowl ad], we had the very best program of everyone we were competing with, but market share just wasn’t growing enough,” said Go Daddy Executive Chairman and Founder Bob Parsons in an interview with Inc. Magazine.
A high-profile Super Bowl ad was just what the doctor ordered.
After Go Daddy issued its first ad in the Super Bowl, market share for the company increased from 16 percent to 25 percent in just one year. In the following years — as Go Daddy continued to release Super Bowl ads — market share grew to 32 percent in 2006 and 42 percent in 2007.
All that glitters is not gold, however, according to several market experts.
Despite the demand, Super Bowl commercials probably aren’t worth the exorbitant prices paid to air them, says Richard Feinberg, a consumer psychologist in Purdue University’s Department of Consumer Sciences and Retailing.
According to Feinberg, the problem is that $3.5 million gets just one play of the commercial, and that single airing may not persuade consumers to get off the couch and go buy the product.
“Since repetition is the foundation of consumer memory, companies just might be better off with ten $300,000 commercials than one $3.5 million commercial,” Feinberg said.
Kirk Wakefield, a professor at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, shares that sentiment.
“If your goal is to get your name out to your target audience, you can find that cheaper somewhere else,” Wakefield said.
Perhaps the best example of a company that has squandered a large amount of money in Super Bowl ads is the American brewing company Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc.
Since 2002, Anheuser-Busch, brewer of the ever-tasty Budweiser beer, spent close to a quarter of a billion dollars on advertising for the Super Bowl.
But the massive campaign was to no avail.
Bud Light and Budweiser — both brewed by Anheuser-Busch — used to be the first and second most popular beers in the U.S. In 2011, the company lost the No. 2 spot to Coors Light, who has spent significantly less in Super Bowl ads than Anheuser-Busch.
I guess Anheuser-Busch can say that the $246 million wasn’t money well spent, and that the company should have channeled the capital into a more successful advertising medium.
Super Bowl commercials are renowned for their ingenuity and amusement, but that does not ensure consumers will become more cognizant of a product or make a purchase more probable than if a company had spent the money in a less expensive but still effective way.
Jay Meyers is a 19-year-old economics freshman from Shreveport. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_jmeyers.
 
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Contact Jay Meyers at [email protected]