The Bone Crunching Down behind Super Bowl’s Commercials
For most of us who sit in front the television on 1st Feb, the Super Bowl may be a social event, an “entertainment spectacle,” or a pure sports event. However, to the marketers and advertisers, it appeared to be the one of the last pieces of ad wonderland for guaranteed exposures and attentions. Over 60 commercials were aired on 1 February (even GoDaddy aired a new makeover ad after pulling down its Buddy ad five days before the big game). Prices have reached $4.5 million dollar range for 30-second commercials this year, increased by more than 11,000 percent over the past 48 years at $40,000 in 1967 for the same ad space. This is not to mention the production costs for the commercials and related promotional activates.
Apparently, the flurry of hype and hyperbole revealed marketers’ soaring fear of being unheard, or unseen. But chances of survival of brands would be bigger if we pay a closer attention to the trends revealed in the Super Bowl this year.
1. Growing trend on Ad Teasers
In recent years, more and more Super Bowl advertisers released their game-day commercials prior to the official debut during the Big Game for the sake of buzz generating. Some of them even produced “teaser commercials,” which are commercials for the commercials. This year we have seen an growing sign on this trend, with over 40% of the commercials were aired in January, which also counted for most of the best-performed commercials places on YouTube views, namely the ads from Always and BMW.
What makes the shark spends over 9 million of their ad budgets on a one-minute ad? Return on investment is always the answer to any advertisers and businesses. In order to maximize the cost effectiveness, advertisers generally believed that one exposure to a commercial is not enough and early exposure would help audience to anticipate hype and accumulate buzz. Teasers were made to preview the commercials like a movie trailer, such as Invisible Mandy from Nationwide and the Big Race from Mercedes-Benz. Bud Light’s Up For Whatever campaign and its real life Pac Men were all over the Internet during days before the game day. Indeed, Google Search Trends supported the anticipatory hype as the search volume of word “Super Bowl” began to escalate about one to two weeks before the game. The trend on ad teaser is expected to grow to gain more likability and excitement from the audience.
2. New form of Engagement: general public and advertising amateurs are taking over the airing time
More brands are coming out from their staged studios to mingle with their fans and engage with the crowd. For 8 years, Doritos has invited their fans to create their own Doritos ads and the winner, decided by online votes, would be guaranteed to air the commercial during the Super Bowl. This year, the winner, Scott Zabielski, was rewarded by $1 million and a one-year job at Universal Pictures. No matter who won the contest, the biggest winner would be the brand, which received nearly 4,900 contestants from 29 cities in the world in the 2015 Doritos Crash The Super Bowl Contest. Also, soft selling and “realistic” responses from general public were increasingly shown in the commercials. For instance, Like a Girl campaign from Always captured the reactions when people were asked to run, throw or flight “ like a girl.” It was filmed more as a social experiment to convey brand’s point of view on a social matter. Also, McCann Erickson created the commercials for Chevrolet’s new Colorado by showing responses of real people in different focus groups settings. Compared to staged commercials, authenticity and interactions are receiving more and more appreciations from the audiences.
3. Media and Screens Agnosticism
Television was expected to be the main carrier for the commercials on the Big Game. On top of the entertainment brought by the game and the commercials, the last minute clash between the winning Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks help draw a historic 114.5 million viewership at the night, scoring the fourth highest rated Super Bowl ever. In addition, digital and social media were expected to be another crucial battlefields to marketers, adding with the valuable element of real time interactions. More than 28.4 million tweets were posted over the course of #SB49, compared to 24.1 million in 2013. And more than 265 million posts, comments and likes were posted on Facebook.
However, relevancy of the content should be carefully considered as the not-so-irrelevant tweets from T mobile on Kim Kardashian’s “unpublished” photos during the game did not receive much positive feedback from their “fans.”
This clearly shows that consumers are generally switching over screens these days more than ever and the trend didn’t show any sign of slowing. This heightened the sense of insecurity and frustration among the marketers. In order to optimize the marketing costs, marketers will need to adopt a mindset of being “media agnostic” or “screen agnostic.’ This means that, advertisers favor only the mediums that make the most sense to specific goals and objectives of the marketing campaign by research and analysis, instead of assuming certain channels like traditionally TV and magazine. Programmatic advertising is gaining more popularity, and Oreo, being the first guinea pig, adopted this mechanism to run its regional ads at the Super Bowl this year. Besides TV Commercials, brands also created microsites and events to engage with their customers, namely Bud Light, and Reebok. A future of living in a multi-screen and multichannel marketing world is anticipated.
What’s behind the TV at Super Bowl was almost as excited as the game.
