The 24-18 victory of Pittsburg Steelers’ on Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII which played in Sunday was the one of the greatest match in history of Super Bowl. So who cares? Of course many NFL fans care, but when we look at the rest all we can see there is only one thing that everybody talks about and makes analyzes about: the Ads!!
For American marketers and advertisers, Super Bowl evolved to be an extended band of ad in which a match is broadcasted in the reaming time. When you search for Super Bowl, you came across with ad analyses, video sites publishing the ads and many ad comments sites. You can find after 10 minutes even the score of this important and interesting game.
In my previous article, I mentioned that the 30 second spot of Super Bowl costs 3 million dollars. That means the worth of one Super Bowl ad is increased 13% despite the economic downturn. According to number revealed after the game, the broadcast channel of the game, NBC, has gained 206 million dollars just from the game. I would like to make a comparison with Turkish market. The revenue of Super Bowl is the same as the entire revenue of outdoor advertising in Turkey in one year. In total 32 advertiser advertised with at least 3 different ads to Super Bowl. And %85 of them paid 3 million dollars ,the maximum amount of money, per ad. NBC started to sell Super Bowl ads back in October 2008 and the bidding continued to the last minute before the game start. Last minute ad sales are also very common in Turkish TV advertising market specifically for sports events.
So, for advertiser how much is the return on investment, considering that they are investing so heavily to a single match?
The Ad Age published a interesting article on this issue. For many advertisers, this match is a ideal platform to advertise because it has an average of 95- 100 million viewers (%50 share is a record for US). Different than a regular NBA or Baseball game, Super Bowl’s ads has many viewers as well, therefore the GRP(Gross Rating Point) rates are higher than measured in other programs. In this respect a brand which advertised during the Super Bowl will have the maximum visibility. In addition to that, people are talking about the ads during and after the game (the word of mouth effect), websites in which the ads are being watched over and over again, plus marketing and advertising blogs are increasing the brand awareness Super Bowl brands. Therefore, brands are reaching to many marketing targets altogether in a very effective way.
Let’s look at the numbers;
One of the beer brands of the Anheuser-Busch, stated that Super Bowl week is the 7th highest sales day of the year. Thanks to people who wanted to watch the ad again the traffic of the Anheuser-Busch official web site increased by 600%, and during the 7 days after the game, 21 million pages viewed in the website.
After the Hyundai ad, the Hyundai website reached to 300 thousand total visitors when the game still is on (the average time spent on site is 5.5 minutes). I think this is the also set a proof to the fact that people are not watching the game but watching the ads. According to Hyundai researches 85% of the customers visiting the website before the purchase decision. Therefore it is very important for Hyundai to draw visitor to the website. Thanks to the increasing visitors the website, Hyundai sold 25 thousand car after the game.
Another good example comes from a internet company. GoDaddy, which is one of the largest hosting companies in the world, increased its market share from 16% to 25% after the its Super Bowl ad, in the first year of its Super Bowl campaign. Next year, the market share reached to %32 after the Super Bowl. I guess, an increase of 7- 9 points in market share in one week can worth 3 million dollars .
Numbers show that for many company, Super Bowl is a very wise investment which brings a high return on investment (ROI). Therefore, companies like Pepsi keep advertising to Super Bowl for many years because they always benefit form it and mostly they can’t risk to not advertising in it.
For all this year’s Super Bowl ads you can visit these websites http://superbowl-ads.com/ , http://adage.com/superbowl09/article?article_id=134136
