Big Bets: To Buy a $5M Super Bowl Ad or Not?

Possibly the most expensive bet on the Super Bowl doesn’t take place in Las Vegas but in the corporate ad room. At a cost of $5M to make a 30-second ad buy, there has been plenty of debate on making a singular buy on mass media versus using the money on a digital marketing approach. As a person who would love to make that call some day, this got me to think what I would do.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start — the debate isn’t what you would do if you had $5M. That’s an easy decision: I’d make the digital marketing buy all day, every day. You must remember that the actual ad production does cost something.

So for this thought experiment, let’s make it more interesting, let’s say your annual ad budget is $7.5M, you’re making the decision for a mass appeal B2C company and you’ve received the “blessing” to actually make a Super Bowl buy if you deem fit. So there’s no worries about it being approved. What would you do?

The easy answer is to put all the efforts towards digital marketing. You can reach a target audience that has a propensity for your product, or have expressed interest in your product before. You’re making a lot of small bets that you can tweak over time, failures can be masked and the course corrected.

But if I had the blessing of the company, I couldn’t turn down the chance to go big. I would make the Super Bowl buy, and here’s how I would do it.

Ad Buy: $5M ($2.5M in the bank)

This is obviously the most expensive part of the equation and you got to pay to play. There’s no negotiating here and you just have to swallow that pill.

Creative: $1M ($1.5M in the bank)

While Doritos has proven that you can get amazing results by crowdsourcing, I would be apprehensive to do so. I would actually go with an agency for all the creative to be made.

To get started, I’ve never, ever worked with an agency on this magnitude. So I don’t know if a million bucks would scratch the surface with some agencies. However, after making a handful of well-produced videos (a inspirational Pixar-esque animated one, a look back at tech support through the ages by the guys who filmed Winnebago Man, and another about online shopping cart errors in real-life), I’m confident that I could find a high quality agency or production company that could make this happen with this budget. They might not be the biggest player in the industry, but there are enough hungry, talented folks who could do the work[1] — many who have produced Sundance premiered films.

The other thing that I’ve learned is that the smaller number of cooks in the kitchen, the better the outcome is going to be. Paying $5M for an ad is a leap of faith — you have to be able to trust your creators with this responsibility rather than micromanaging it.

I’ve seen it too often, folks who haven’t done anything creative since finger painting in the 2nd grade trying to dictate to someone who has honed their craft on what should be done.

That doesn’t mean that the business shouldn’t have involvement with the creative agency, but that involvement should be in the form of a very tight knit team. This team should have members whom have both a reverence for the business and for the creative process. The team has to walk that delicate line of allowing freedom while providing guidance. And damn, that’s a tough line to walk.

So what should be delivered? There should be a lot, but these are some of the things I have in mind:

· The actual commercial with a call-to-action of visiting a website (I can’t fathom why any Super Bowl commercial — even if you are a major brand — wouldn’t have that)

· A landing page, full experience for people to land on after seeing the commercial (more on this later)

· Visual assets to be used across social media

· Banner assets to be used across paid media

· The “Teaser,” “Making Of,” “Extended Cut” and “Social Media Cut” videos

Ideally, there would be some sort of savvy integration for consumers to participate by creating media — a la the Butterfinger Bold campaign this year where folks were doing their own touchdown dances in front of Terrell Owens for a Butterfinger — that could also be repurposed. Admittedly, this can be hard and can fall on its face if it sucks. So depending whether I had a full-fledged digital agency versus of production company, I would gauge whether or not I would do something like that.

At the end of the day, I put preference on making a video that wins rather than trying to reach. After all, the Budweiser frogs, Mean Joe Green grabbing a Coke and the Betty White Snickers spots didn’t have a “user generated content” piece and they all won.

PR Activity: $100k ($1.4M in the bank)

Right now we have our ad spot bought, the commercial filmed and $1.5M in the bank. So what happens next? You start the hype machine. People freakin’ love Super Bowl commercials. LOVE them.

How many times have you heard the saying, “Yeah, I tuned in to the big game not for the football but because of the commercials.” How many Super Bowl parties have you been to where the room got quiet for the commercial instead of a crucial fourth-and-two play? There’s an insatiable appetite for these spots, transforming the media from simply fast-forward on the DVR to must see TV.

So you better believe that you need to cash in on this love, and this should be done before the game. This is the time to get the PR machine working — I’m a firm believer that the $5M media buy should not be looked at as purely for those 30 measly seconds, but rather for all the free media coverage you can get before and after the game.

One way to stretch that money is to have a narrative around the commercial. Loctite is one case that comes to mind. This little company was everywhere before the Super Bowl because of their story about a small company that spent their entire year’s ad budget on thirty seconds.

What a great narrative about that good ole American value of risk taking, and you know what, we all ate it up. I remember hearing about their spot on NPR and thinking, “Damn, these folks have some cojones!” And you better believe that when I had an antique doorknob that came loose and had some obscure-machined screw that I bought some Loctite to fasten it back.

Then there’s the organic story lines that can sprout after the commercial airs. After Betty White appeared in the Snickers Super Bowl commercial there was a surge of popularity for her, ultimately resulting in a gig hosting Saturday Night Live. And the Snickers brand was along for the ride, reaping the rewards of all that post Super Bowl buzz.

Finally—and this is a complete crapshoot—your commercial could find a way to transcend the singular Super Bowl event and become part of the Super Bowl commercial canon. If this happens, your brand will be referenced over-and-over, becoming the yardstick for all future commercials to be compared to. I’m a firm believer that getting that narrative out to the media can help your commercial stick and potentially be one of the most memorable ones.

To Prematurely Air or Not?

One thing that I’m uncertain about is whether I would prematurely air my commercial or leave it for the big game. By going online well before the Super Bowl, many commercials attempt to capitalize on as much hype as possible. Hell, the Doritos commercials are all crowdsourced and voted on by the Internet at large.

I see the merits in having the spot online before, but I’m torn on letting it be a big reveal during the actual game. This is the one thing that people actually sit down to watch. And I hate it when I see a Super Bowl commercial for the first time and my smug friend is like, “Yeah, I saw it last week on YouTube, where have you been man?”

So be it a personal preference, I’d opt towards having a lot of hype building up to the ad rather than having the ad itself online prior to the Super Bowl. Done right, I believe that you can be active in several media cycles well before the big game.

Case in point this year, Taco Bell has played the hype machine masterfully for Super Bowl 50, releasing a redacted press release and also allowing folks to pre-order their new menu item sight unseen before it goes on sale. Talk about mystery meat (and something that I totally had to do).

Website Backend and Load Testing: $100k ($1.3M in the bank)

One thing that will be an absolute guarantee is that your website traffic is going to explode. I work for Rackspace, the #1 managed hosting company, and we’ve managed servers for a fair share of websites that have seen monstrous traffic due to things like a Shark Tank appearances, Oprah recommendations and Super Bowl commercials.

Without getting into all the ins and outs, I can tell you that it is (1) absolutely critical for your site to be robust enough to stand up to this kind of traffic and (2) there are very defined strategies to employ for you to do so.

Your website is on a server and it does just that, serve. Instead of bringing out a New York strip with a baked potato and nice glass of wine, your web server is sending and receiving information packets fill with 1s and 0s. But just as a single server in a packed restaurant can get overwhelmed with customer requests, so can a web server get overrun with information requests causing it to fail and metaphorically stomp out of a restaurant without serving Joe his steak.

There are many different ways to help your website be able to sustain an massive influx of traffic (service-oriented architecture, multiple nodes, hybrid cloud, caching and static versus dynamic website), but the important thing is to acknowledge that you want experts there guiding you and your team along the way. You will need additional infrastructure. And you will want to load test well in advance of the event — trust but verify.

I’m confident that $100k is more than will need to be spent, but it underlines the importance of having this in your plan. After all, what good is spending $5M on a spot if you’re only going to frustrate eager customers trying to access your website.

Other Website Things to Consider

This is where it starts getting fun and you get to throw down a bit of digital marketing foo. You want to make sure that you have the ability to capitalize on all the traffic coming your way. Don’t just send traffic to the page, have a way to take advantage of it. Many of these things should be handled in the ad creative cost, but you want to ensure that all these qualities are on your webpage.

Make it Mobile Friendly

We do not live in a desktop world. I don’t give a damn how beautiful your ad’s landing page looks on a MacBook or flat panel display, the majority of your traffic — especially after your add airs on TV— is going to be on a phone and tablet. It better be easy to read and navigate on the small screen, while delivering an amazing experience. Not doing so is just like taking your money and lighting it on fire.

Have an Actionable Task

It’s key to have a specific action that you want a customer to take on your website. This can be anything from gathering email information to send out a coupon to inviting the users to connect with their Facebook account to play a game or vote in a contest. Regardless, it’s important that you not only get the consumer to take an action, but that you have an ability to connect with them later.

I’m a big fan of building an email list right now. In my personal experience of running a very small Ecommerce store, I’ve seen a newsletter have far more reaching impacts over organic social — including click through rates and making a sale. Email is so hot right now, which is why you’re seeing companies like The Skimm become so popular.

Install Pixels

You’re need to know how effective your efforts are, so to this end you’re going to want to have analytics and conversion pixels. The analytics will be important to analyze the types of traffic coming into your site along with the point of origin (direct load, social, referring site).

But you’ll additionally want to have a way to measure conversions for a particular action, and that’s where conversion pixels come into play. Most analytics packages (like Google Analytics) have the ability for you to define a “Goal” that you can measure with. And if you are doing paid social amplification (which you should be) there are conversion pixels associated with the different platforms to measure the effectiveness of social campaigns.

You’ll also want to build a custom audience of all the people who’ve visited the site, so you can hit them up with additional paid display and social efforts. You know that they’ve already expressed interest, so it’s worth segmenting that audience for future digital marketing practices.

Choose YouTube for Your Video

Let me be clear here — for a viral Super Bowl marketing campaign you will want to choose YouTube to host your video over any other video playback service. The whole point of making a Super Bowl commercial is so people can see it, and since YouTube represents the second largest search engine (second only to Google) you’ll want it on this service.

But more than a site to consume videos, YouTube is sort of a social network in and of itself. Viewers will be able to easily share your video, comment, build playlists and embed it on their own sites. You’ll also be able to provide different call to actions (with cards, overlays, annotations and in the descriptions) on the video that can help drive visitors to your site. Just make sure to give each link a unique referral code so you can determine how much traffic it’s driving.

Complimentary Social Buy: $500k ($800k in the bank)

You’re going to have a ton of word of mouth for your Super Bowl spot, paid display and social is just going to pour gas on the fire. This is how I would divide up this spend over the next two weeks.

First, I wouldn’t make any social buys on Super Bowl Sunday. You’d have to pay through the nose in order to get a social marketing ad in front of people on Twitter or Facebook that day. The cost to display your ad is dependent on what others are willing to pay, and you better believe that the larger brands will be driving up that cost. Waiting until the following day could let the cost settle down a bit.

Second, I would suggest not promoting your video on Facebook and Twitter. Most people have probably seen your video — your goal should now be to drive folks to your website to take that defined action and to learn more about your brand. So all your social marketing efforts should be done to further that goal.

Riff on the ad and make sure your creative ties together, but get them to your site. Additionally, both Twitter and Facebook considers a “view” when a user sees three seconds of your video on their native platform. THREE SECONDS! And that could happen even if the video is muted. I don’t necessarily want to pay for a person to just scroll by my ad.

Third, I would suggest promoting your video on YouTube, especially using that pre-roll feature (you know, those ads that you have to watch five seconds of before you can skip to the video you want to see). Being that you bought a Super Bowl ad, I’m going to assume that the video has a hook within those 5 seconds and people will want to watch it. Additionally, YouTube qualifies a view as a user watching at least 30 seconds of your ad, which means you’re only paying for meaningful views.

This is how I would suggest initially allocating that budget:

· YouTube: $16,000/day for 5 days = $80k

· Facebook: $15,000/day for 14 days = $210k

· Twitter: $15,000/day for 14 days = $210k

I would then evaluate the cost per click and acquisition on Facebook and Twitter and shift budget to what was performing better.

Remainder of Year: $800k ($0k left in bank)

After making that splash, I would take that remaining $800k and spend it on typical digital marketing activities: paid, search and social. I would try to take advantage of those users who expressed interest during the Super Bowl ad and put an emphasis on targeting that group throughout the year.

At this point, it should be primarily business as usual, but with a strong effort to nurture those folks who I gathered contact information. I would make sure that there were compelling email nurture tracks to keep those customers engaged. Again, I feel that a solid email list is worth its weight in gold and I would work hard to cultivate that list.

Fourth Down Decision

Ultimately, making a Super Bowl buy is a gamble, similar to going for it on fourth and short in your own territory in the second quarter. But when you face down risk with the right play, you have a high likelihood of being successful while looking like an offensive genius.

While making the decision to buy a Super Bowl commercial may be a gamble, I don’t think I could walk away from the opportunity. Yes, there’s a lot of uncertainty of success, but with this game plan I feel my company would be successful. And the reward of having the commercial of the game far outweighs the risk of falling on your face.

I’ve written some other stuff about Digital Marketing on CMO Digital Forum. And if you find yourself in San Antonio, check out my blog SA Flavor for ideas on where to find the best enchiladas.