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Super Bowl ads: More fumbles than touchdownsby Robert Duboff and Scott Berman While football fans in New England anxiously await the Super Bowl, they can only guess at the outcome. We marketers can much more confidently anticipate the results of the Super Bowl advertising. This most American form of communication has become an integral part of the event, with surveys and articles about the ads in virtually all major print media. The price of admission is high -- well over $2 million for each 30-second message. With the stakes that high, you'd think each ad would be as carefully honed for effectiveness as the game plans for each of the football teams. You'd be wrong. Despite the cost of the investment (or, ironically, because of it), a majority of Super Bowl ads make a sad commentary on the marketing art. An effective ad must first register with its intended target and then have an impact that eventually converts into a purchase. On a rudimentary level, to be effective, the ultimate purchases prompted by the ad must exceed the costs of that ad to yield a positive return on investment. The Super Bowl is typically one of the top two or three rated television programs of the entire year, one of the few times that television is indeed a mass medium, with more than half of all households watching (not to mention bars and other social settings not captured in the household ratings). That is why advertising time costs so much. It is also the core snare and delusion, for two unrelated reasons. No matter whom your target is, there are more of them watching the Super Bowl than almost any other individual television program. Targeting CEOs? CIOs? Golfers? There are going to be more of them in the Super Bowl audience than for other shows. Better to reach them in one fell swoop, the argument goes, than to try to reach them piecemeal. The problem with this logic is that the economics (the $2 million) are based on the mass audience for which the cost per person in the target is quite reasonable (or at least within the range of most other programs). Even worse is the second problem -- making a message available to a target is necessary but hardly sufficient to accomplish anything. Just as a Super Bowl team has to compete with the other team, Super Bowl ads are competing, too. On one level, they are competing with all the other ads. The Super Bowl field is by far the toughest of the advertising season. Almost all the ads are premieres and many are from the most clever advertisers who know how to surprise the audience. Many are quite humorous. The advertisers, in trying to get into the consciousness of the target, are also competing with the game, the refrigerator and the bathroom. Because of this, even business-to-business advertisers try for a level of surprise that they rarely would use in any other context. (Think back to an ad for EDS showing the difficulty of herding cats. Attention-getting? Yes. Effective? No.) This means that they and most other advertisers are playing the wrong game. They behave as if making a good ad that viewers notice is the whole game. (The day-after surveys, such as the one USA Today conducts, have helped create this problem with awareness of the ad becoming the scorecard instead of the real business measure: Did the ad eventually produce revenue that exceeded costs?) Awareness of an ad is just as good awareness of a product is. However, if the message itself does not get through with enough impact to enough of the target, the entire exercise has been a waste. Watch the ads this year and think about these questions: Is this ad targeted for a mass market? Is it likely that viewers noticed it? (Remember, this is necessary, but hardly sufficient.) Did the message get through? (Note: if the ad is too complicated for you to understand the point immediately, the answer to this question is "no.") Is it likely that the message will prompt enough people to spend enough money to cover the costs of the ad? Our Super Bowl bet, based on the past decade of viewing Super Bowls, is that only one in 10 of the ads will be winners on all four questions. Many players have also dropped out, but there are always new players stepping up to the advertising game. They are enticed by that audience and that platform. They want to play in the Super Bowl just like every football player does. In football, they say "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." In the marketing game, you need ROI to win -- and that's the only way you should play. Robert Duboff is CEO and Scott Berman is president of HawkPartners, a strategic-marketing consultancy in Cambridge. © 2004 American City Business Journals Inc.
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