Tuesday, May 6, 2008

$3 Million for a Super Bowl Spot: A Super Value?

The announcement that NBC will start Super Bowl :30 spots at $3 million was all over the ad world today. Let's think about what advertisers are getting for that $3 million...

• In 2008, 97.4 million people tuned in at some point to watch the Super Bowl.

• Assuming the recession continues, consumers are going to be looking for cheap entertainment options. Televised NFL games fit this perfectly. Next year's numbers should be even bigger.

• Those kind of numbers make the Super Bowl one of the last remaining "mass media" TV events. Brands with diverse, wide-ranging targets, like Coca-Cola, Fed Ex, and Anheuser-Busch, should jump at the chance to hit that kind of cross-section of America. With a low estimate of about 50% of Super Bowl viewers falling within the targets for these dominant brands, that's about $60 CPM. A little on the high side, but definitely competitive.

• And what else does the brand get for their $3 million? For brands that do the Super Bowl right--brands that create funny or novel or charming :30 stories--YouTube hits, Monday morning watercooler discussions, and Top 10 lists across the Internet and USA Today. True, the online stats for last year's commercials aren't mind-blowing--one version of Pepsi's Justin Timberlake ad has a modest 2.4 million YouTube hits--but that doesn't include replays on the Pepsi site.

The added value of Super Bowl ads is what comes after the big game. If marketers get more interactive and more integrated and use the Super Bowl to launch microsites, or if they create a hilarious ad that get passed around the Internet, they're getting at least their $3 million worth of exposure. So right on, NBC, for analyzing the trends and making the most of this epic opportunity.

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