Should You Invest in Super Bowl Advertising?

As we wind down the year, it’s time to start thinking about 2025. One of the most important events at the beginning of the year for advertisers is the Super Bowl. Ad agencies have likely been working on crafting commercials for their clients for several weeks or even months so they can hit the airwaves with a big splash. The question remains: Super Bowl advertising. Yes or no?

On Sunday, when two teams that survived a season marked by injury and unexpected losses will face off in the next Super Bowl with millions of eyeballs watching. This broadcast attracts viewers from not only the US but, increasingly, from other parts of the world who are discovering a passion for football. Streaming live via a number of platforms, as well as showing on broadcast TV, the show is one of the most watched programs. It’s also one of the most expensive for advertisers. This year, advertising will cost $7 million per 30 seconds, according to Sports Illustrated, a substantial hike over last year’s prices. Of course, what advertisers pay varies greatly depending on a variety of factors, but $7 million is still a LOT of money.

So, can your firm afford to do Super Bowl Advertising, or should it simply be a pass this year?

Why use Super Bowl advertising?

Eyeballs

The Super Bowl gathers more eyeballs in one place than any other event in human history. Last year, 115 million people (230 million eyeballs) watched the Super Bowl — a game that ranked as one of the biggest blowouts in Super Bowl history. Where else can you reach over 100 million people? Although the increase in viewership has slowed over recent years, in an increasingly fragmented TV programming world that’s spread across traditional, cable, and streaming, the Super Bowl still represents a chance for advertisers to reach a large, diverse audience.

Joining the lineup for this year’s advertising, we find some new faces joining some companies coming back to place ads in the program, including:

• Ritz, making its debut in this year’s programming with an ad for crackers
• Hellman’s is putting together an ad for its mayo
• Coors Light, which is a perennial advertiser as beer and football simply go together
• Instacart will also debut an ad this year
• Mountain Dew will return to the Super Bowl
• Nerdwallet joins other tech companies with a first-time ad
• General Mills has put together an ad for Totino’s Pizza Rolls for the first time
• Pizza Hut returns after three years
• Disney

Buzz

Super Bowl advertising builds buzz around your brand. For instance, the Apple “1984” commercial launching the Macintosh Computer is credited with saving the brand. Of course, advertising in the Super Bowl isn’t just Super Bowl advertising anymore. Instead, brands use the entire month to preview their ads, posting teasers online, in print, on movie trailers, and in other media to build buzz for their Super Bowl Ads. The ads are previewed in newscasts leading up to the big game and armchair quarterbacks write critiques of individual ads, highlighting the best and worst. In fact, the surprise is gone. By the time the game airs on Sunday, only the game itself remains unseen.

Why not spend on Super Bowl advertising?

Other brands haven’t had the same luck that Apple did when it introduced the Mac, which explains why some brands are pulling out of Super Bowl advertising this year and many are cutting back. GoDaddy even pulled their ad, which was scheduled to air in 2015, after criticism from animal lovers. This isn’t the first time GoDaddy has experienced controversy over its Super Bowl advertising. This controversy itself might have prompted them to continue producing commercials of this ilk.  The company is committed to replacing the ad with something less objectionable rather than lose the chance to continue its march toward being a household name in domain registration.

Some big brands have just said “No” to Super Bowl advertising this year, although Fox said in an earnings call that all the ad space for the 2025 Super Bowl sold. Some automakers are dropping off, with only a few choosing to air Super Bowl ads, such as Jeep, compared with 11 brands advertising in last year’s Super Bowl, making up 25% of all the ad spend last year. Other notable brands missing from this year’s Super Bowl ad lineup (according to Time Magazine) include Dannon (the official yogurt of the Super Bowl- which begs the question of why there is an official yogurt of the Super Bowl). Coke and GoDaddy each dropped their Super Bowl buy to one ad rather than their standard two.

Of course, some newcomers, enticed by promises they’ll rise above their relative obscurity, are filling the void. Among them are Loctite, Wix (the website-building platform), and Mophie (the smartphone case manufacturer). It’s an open question of whether they’ll see a return from their gamble or fail, as Groupon did when they made the foray into Super Bowl advertising.

What makes a Super Bowl ad successful?

Spending $7 million for a single Super Bowl ad isn’t for the faint of heart — or small businesses. The risks are enormous — just ask GoDaddy, who paid for some of the least popular Super Bowl commercials in recent years and are scrambling to replace this year’s scheduled ad.

In fact, just as the rewards are enormous, so are the risks. Just ask advertisers who paid for some of the worst ads in Super Bowl history, according to the New York Post:

1. Ameriquest – whose ad in 2006 showed an unlucky female passenger who ended up in her seatmate’s lap. Moral: don’t piss off 1/2 of your audience.
2. Bud Light — In 2007, Budweiser spent good money showing a clown walking into a bar on his hands. While it’s an interesting joke first line — a clown walks into a bar — it fell flat. Moral: pretest.
3. General Motors — 2007 just wasn’t a good year for big brands advertising on the Super Bowl. General Motors showed a robot after losing his job on the assembly line. Moral: even robots have feelings.
4. Sales Genie — showed an animated commercial featuring Kung Fu Panda. It showed Asians as stupid and unsophisticated. Moral: don’t piss off any demographic, even if they’re not a big part of your audience.
5. Sobe — ballet and athletes just don’t mix. It doesn’t matter how you animate their partners. Moral: confusing the audience doesn’t work well.
6. Doritos — don’t use a ninja to protect your stash. It doesn’t work.
7. Groupon — adding to their list of mistakes, Groupon followed up with a Tibetan-themed failure. Moral: see 1 and 4. Some folks just don’t learn from the mistakes of other advertisers.
8. Coke — mixing cowboys, camels, and showgirls?????
9. GoDaddy — following its pattern of failed Super Bowl commercials, GoDaddy aired a spot in last year’s game featuring Jersey Shoreesque folks running for a tanning salon. Moral: GoDaddy should stick to domain registration.
10. Bud Light — never one to shy away from past failures, Budweiser aired a commercial in last year’s game that was simply a snoozer. Moral: folks have to visit the bathroom sometime during the broadcast. Make sure it isn’t during your commercial.

Other dos and don’ts for your Super Bowl advertising:

Dos [source]

• Build an emotional response in your ad. Even in B2B advertising, emotions matter more than logic. In fact, 82% of consumers respond that they are influenced by emotion in making purchase decisions.

  

• Humor similarly affects about 80% of purchase decisions. However, humor can fall flat, especially in an increasingly multicultural world.
• Be authentic, especially when targeting minority groups
• Nostalgia is a great tool for building a loyal customer base, as Coke found out the hard way when the company tried to reinvent Coca-Cola.
• Celebrity endorsements are a tried and true means to prompt sales. However, in the digital age, consider using influencers with a significant standing in among your target market, mainly if that includes a large number of younger consumers.

Don’ts

• Avoid nudity. Even Victoria (Secret) produced a tame commercial for this year’s game
• Test — you never know what works until you test. Spending $4.5 million on a commercial that falls flat or pisses folks off is a hugely lousy investment. Of course, many advertisers want to make a big splash with a quirky ad and exposing your target market to that ad before the big game tends to blunt that impact. However, you can still do testing of small, representative groups consisting of members of your target market without broadcasting the ad to a broader audience.
• Don’t push the envelope too far. Ask GoDaddy.

Trends in Super Bowl Advertising

Looking at AdAge’s growing list of who’s airing Super Bowl commercials this year (and who’s not), you’ll see some trends in this year’s Super Bowl creative strategies, especially related to brands’ use of social media.

1. Social media integration — a number of brands used contests to create social media buzz about their Super Bowl commercials. Some, like Carnival, asked consumers to vote for their favorite commercial on social networks and will air the winning commercial during the Super Bowl. Others, like Doritos, asked consumers to create their own commercials and will air the winner. Will social media ever make Super Bowl advertising obsolete? My guess is yes — but I think it’s time for traditional media to move over and make way for social media. Budget priorities have to shift. But if you ask Pepsi, you’ll likely get a different answer. They replaced Super Bowl advertising 5 years ago with a social media and social good campaign. They didn’t repeat. I’m not sure if it was strictly a business decision or executives covering their own #$%. Who got fired for budgeting for Super Bowl advertising? Anyone with access to the metrics, please jump in here with your take on Pepsi’s decision.

   

2. Pre- and post-game release to social media. A number of big brands, including Pepsi and Lexus, released their ads early to capitalize on Super Bowl hype and will likely continue after the game by releasing them to YouTube.
3. Other brands, taking a page from the Apple Macintosh playbook, are keeping their creative secret until unveiled at the big game, hoping to capitalize on surprise and maximize emotional reactions.

Conclusion

Purchasing a Super Bowl ad still makes sense if you have the steep cost of entry. Not only does a 30-second spot cost $7 million, you must pay for production costs, which can nearly double the price. If you have extreme luck, like the Apple 1984 introduction of the Mac, airing the ad once is enough (after the first broadcast, the family of George Orwell, who wrote the book 1984, enjoined the company from showing it again as a trademark violation). That’s especially true if your ad continues to be shared over the years in various formats (we still talk about that ad years later, and it’s a pop culture reference).

Measuring the success of your Super Bowl advertising is critical, as well as being hard to do. Without direct measures of lift (a marketing term designating additional sales due to a marketing campaign), justifying such a large expenditure relies on indirect measures and direct results assessing the success of your social media portions of the campaign to extrapolate the overall success of your ads.

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