Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Are Super Bowl TV Ads Obsolete - Part 1


As American as the Super Bowl, every year tens of millions of Americans tune in for the country's favorite game as well as the ads and the halftime performance headlined by America's top performers. It's for this reason that NBC, FOX and CBS can get away with charging north of $5 million dollars for a 30 second ad. But honestly, is it worth it for brands to be spending monstrous sums for 15 to 30 seconds of airtime?

Measured simply by eyeballs, the super Bowl guarantees brands such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, over a hundred million views.  The views are great but I would be hard pressed to find an American who has never sipped one of the two colas, let alone seen one.

So why do household staples such as Kraft and m&m's get in on the Super Bowl ad bidding war? They do it for the love of the American people because we buy brands that we  know, therefore more likely to trust and love.  However, research by Genesis media shows that 90% of people report that they would not buy something because of a 15-30 second ad that they saw during the Super Bowl. As such, these ads are targeted at maintaining loyalty/ brand awareness more than selling much like buying your partner an anniversary gift is aimed at showing you care rather than convincing them of your love.
However, this is not the case for all brands. 

For fresher faces such as Weather Tech and Monster Products, Super Bowl ads actually may make sense. Monster Products, the team that brought us "Beats by Dre" and several other celebrity branded electronics was unknown to me until I began doing research for this article. In the same way, I imagine that Monster Products' Super Bowl ad will give the company a boost in searches, a much needed independence of the brand from celebrity figures so that it can stand on its own feet and actually have a marginal impact on sales while minimizing budgets for endorsements.

When all is said and done, the elephant in the room is the fact that more Americans are turning to streaming over watching cable. Especially with mobile streaming cookies, brands are empowered to target the right audiences. Why then, don't we have separate mobile ads and real time ad bidding processes to optimally match ads with the most likely buyers on mobile rather than casting a wide net that will likely not move the needle.


http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/super-bowl-lii-ad-tracker-all-about-the-big-games-2018-commercials/

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