(By Paul Farhi,
Washington Post, 31 January 2014)
It’s one
thing to create a buzzworthy commercial packed with celebrities, hot babes or
that old reliable, Stuff Blowing Up. You’ll see plenty of that during Sunday’s
Super Bowl telecast, from Budweiser’s puppy-meets-Clydesdales spot
to Jaguar’s
cinematic extravaganza on behalf of its new $65,000 coupe. But it’s quite another thing to figure out
how to deliver all that would-be buzziness to the most people at the lowest
possible price. That’s the
game within the big ad game, the multimillion-dollar Super Bowl sponsor
challenge. Advertisers know their commercials will be seen by tens of millions
of people, and that airtime will sell for appropriately ludicrous amounts. This
year, the average cost of a 30-second commercial will be about $4 million,
or $133,000 per second, about the same as last year.
But, as the
ads often say, your results might vary. The average cost is all but meaningless
to Super Bowl sponsors, who cut complicated deals with the game’s broadcaster
(this year, Fox), often many months in advance. What advertisers really care
about is an ad’s “efficiency,” or its cost per viewer. Figuring that out is harder than you’d think
— “more art than science,” as marketing professor George Belch of
San Diego State University puts it. The calculation involves some educated
guesswork about when to buy a Super Bowl ad, how much to pay and where to place
a spot during the nearly four-hour broadcast.
The process is complicated by an unknowable factor: Will one team
dominate, or will the game be close? And for how long? It matters — a lot.
Viewers stick around for competitive games but leave by the millions during a
blowout. The
NFL found this out to its chagrin in the 1990s, when ratings dipped for a
series of lopsided games.
The rules of
the Super Bowl ad game have evolved over the preceding XLVIII years and are
evolving still in the age of social media. Here are a few of the basics:
Rule No.
1: No one pays the sticker price.
The Super
Bowl advertising marketplace is like a Turkish
souk: Everyone haggles. Yes,
$4 million is the average cost per ad, but the actual cost to an
advertiser varies widely. The biggest advertisers — Coca Cola, Anheuser-Busch,
General Motors, etc. — will pay far less than the reported average, says Marc
Morse, senior vice president of media-buying
agency RJ Palmer in New York. The
primary reason: Big buyers command big discounts. They buy multiple ad “units”
— 30- and 60-second spots — spread over the game. Anheuser-Busch, for example,
will run three ads for Bud Light and two for Budweiser. It also has a
multi-year contract to advertise during the game, further reducing its overall
costs. No such luck for one-off
advertisers, such as SodaStream, which markets do-it-yourself soda-making
machines (and has lately
been involved in a controversy over its decision to build a factory in an
Israeli settlement in the West Bank). The company, whose ad stars Scarlett
Johansson, paid top dollar for its single, 30-second unit, though President
Yonah Lloyd declined to specify his cost. “For us, the Super Bowl is the
perfect vehicle to educate the American consumer” about the company’s products,
he said in an interview. And deals
involving Super Bowl ads usually involve more than Super Bowl ads. Time during
the big game is often sold as part of a package that includes commercials
during other programs or on channels owned by the Super Bowl’s broadcaster. “The
networks try to get you to buy other things,” Morse said. “CBS [last year]
said, ‘If you want the Super Bowl, you have to [buy] March Madness. This year
it was, ‘If you want the Super Bowl, be prepared for an equal spend on Fox
[Sports] 1,’ ” a Fox-owned cable network.
Rule No.
2: Buy early, save later.
Spending
millions on a Super Bowl ad isn’t all that different than spending a few
hundred on a plane ticket or hotel room. The sooner you buy, the lower the
price is likely to be. Many advertisers
buy at the “upfronts,” the annual meetings between network sellers and
advertising buyers, held in June. As a result, much of Fox’s “inventory” of
Super Bowl time was spoken for by last summer. (Fox declined to comment for
this article.)
As long as
there’s demand, prices for whatever is left tend to rise as the game gets
closer. But on occasion, it pays to be patient. When Detroit’s slumping
automakers passed up the game during the worst years of the recession,
last-minute advertisers snapped up unsold spots at bargain prices.
Rule No.
3: First in, last out.
Advertisers
pay extra to air commercials in the first and last positions in a “pod,” or
cluster of commercials. These are considered the most-watched and the most
memorable positions. Basic inertia
explains why it’s good to be first: People haven’t jumped off the couch yet as
the game stops for the commercial break. Anticipation explains why the last
spot is primo: People are rushing back to their seats as the game gets set to
resume.
Rule No.
4: Buy early in the game, too.
Advertisers
tend to clamor to show ads in the first half of the game and usually in the
first quarter. The reason? It’s when the audience is most stable, most
predictable and most attentive to the advertising. “It’s the safest place to be,” says Jennifer
Clayton, the manager of advertising planning and buying for Herndon, Va.-based Volkswagen
of America, which is airing a humorous
one-minute ad in the second quarter (in the first “pod” position of the
second ad break) Sunday. “The game hasn’t been determined, and there’s a lot of
hype about what the brands are doing. People focus on that.” Which is why advertisers pay premium prices
for ads shown during the first half. Second-half
advertisers, meanwhile, not only risk losing droves of viewers to a bum game,
they also have to fight viewer fatigue. “A
lot of people are watching the game at parties. They’ve been there for hours,
and they’re getting tired,” says San Diego State’s Belch. “By the third or
fourth quarter, the same enthusiasm is just not there. So, you’re rolling the
dice a little bit” by placing an ad during this part of the game. Last year, the bet paid off. According to the
Nielsen ratings service, the audience for the Ravens-49ers contest grew by 25
percent from its low point to its high point, peaking at nearly
115 million viewers late in the second half of what turned out to be a
dramatic game. Although that result
delighted fourth-quarter advertisers — Big audience! Low price! — it was a
fortuitous result, Morse said. “You can look like a genius [under those
circumstances], but you can’t really plan it,” he said. “If we could, we’d be
running the world.”
Rule No.
5: You need ads for your ads.
A Super Bowl
commercial is just the start of an advertiser’s advertising . . . about its
Super Bowl advertising. The
commercial is just the middle. Thanks to social media, companies engage in a
buildup about their ads before the game, and most follow up afterward, too. Volkswagen says it was the first advertiser
to release its Super Bowl ad online before the game in 2011 (for a charming
spot called “The Force”).
It also says it was the first to release a teaser ad, called “The Bark
Side,” for its Super Bowl commercial in 2012. The effort propelled its
commercials to viral status. (Well,
technically, Apple may have been the first advertiser to “pre-release” its
legendary “1984” Super Bowl ad 30 years ago by quietly airing it a few times in
places such as Twin Falls, Idaho, in late 1983; it did so to qualify the
commercial for advertising awards.) Now,
pre-release promotion is common. Many advertisers have released teasers on
YouTube, Facebook and other platforms. And many advertisers release the ads
themselves days before the game, seemingly undercutting their big-game
“reveal.”
The idea, of
course, is to create buzz before the buzz starts. SodaStream’s Johansson commercial, released
this week, led to calls for a boycott of the Israeli-based company; a Cheerios
commercial featuring a biracial family also got media attention after
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus objected to MSNBC’s
characterization of it in a tweet. (MSNBC tweeted, “Maybe the rightwing
will hate it, but everyone else will go awww,” but then withdrew it and
apologized.) This year, Volkswagen
promoted its Super Bowl commercial with a
teaser ad making fun of Super Bowl ads. It will also run mobile ads
mentioning its Super Bowl ad after the game in an effort to capture residual
interest, according to Clayton. But
there’s a limit to how much anyone can keep hyping the hype; search-engine
queries for Super Bowl ads start to fall quickly about 48 hours after the game
ends, she said. At which point, of
course, the company will be thinking about the 2015 Super Bowl.
No comments:
Post a Comment