A media buyer's
primer to Super Bowl
The facts and numbers you need to know for Sunday's game
By Toni Fitzgerald
Jan 31, 2012
As the Super Bowl nears, two things hog the headlines each year at this time.
First, oddsmakers begin to lay down lines on who will win the actual game. This year the New England Patriots, the top seed in the AFC, are favored by three points over the New York Giants, who upset the heavily favored Patriots in the 2008 Super Bowl.
Second, there is a late-breaking commercial controversy. This year it's courtesy of Skechers, the shoe company that featured Kim Kardashian in last year's Super Bowl ad.
In the wake of Kardashian's quickie divorce, which received a lot of public backlash, Skechers decided to feature animals instead of the reality star.
But Skechers shot the ad at a greyhound racing track, upsetting animal rights activists who consider dog racing inhumane, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA is urging the company to pull the ad and has organized a write-in campaign to Skechers objecting to greyhound racing.
An online petition has also been started urging NBC to boycott the ad. It's already received more than 100,000 signatures, though it would probably need to get 10 times that for the network to actually consider nixing the ad.
Besides the annual ad controversy and the game line, there are other things media buyers need to know about this weekend's big game, namely how it will perform as a vehicle for their clients' advertising.
So here’s a quick media buyers' primer on the Super Bowl, which airs Sunday at 6 p.m. live from Indianapolis on NBC.
According to Kantar Media, the average 30-second spot for the game sold for $3.5 million, smashing the former record of $3.1 million set last year by Fox.
The game was sold out two months ago, marking the second straight year that ads were in high demand. That was a big turnaround from the recession-addled game in 2010, when ad prices fell for just the second time in the past decade and many longtime advertisers, such as FedEx and Pepsi, sat the game out.
In fact, the Super Bowl is in such high demand that CBS, which will air next year's game, has already reportedly made some deals for the game a year in advance.
Advertisers always pay a premium to have their ads run during the desirable first-half slots. That’s when viewers are still engaged, the game is usually still close, and the halftime beer run has yet to be made.
Still, the debate has raged for years over whether any Super Bowl ad buy is worth it. In 1999 and 2000, when venture capital money was flowing into the dot.coms, it became a trendy buy, with nearly $50 million spent over those two years by startup companies.
After the dot.com crash, internet companies became more cautious, and they've remained so. There will be dot.coms advertising this year, but not as many as the more than a dozen who bought time a decade ago.
This year, it looks as though humor again will be the overriding creative theme. Anheuser-Busch, Honda, Volkswagen and other brands are hoping big laughs will score with viewers.
Movie studios are expected to be heavy advertisers, though perhaps not as heavy as last year, when more than half a dozen ads aired. This year 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. have decided not to air Super Bowl ads.
Still, highly anticipated spots for Relativity Media's "Act of Valor," Disney's "John Carter" and Paramount's "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" are expected to air.
Movies promoted during the Super Bowl generally achieve double the opening weekend and final box office numbers as non-Super Bowl advertised movies, according to ad buying agency Carat.
Meanwhile, several companies, including Century 21, H&M and Dannon, will be airing their first Super Bowl commercials. Last year only four new advertisers joined the game, down from the usual six or seven.
Longtime big-game advertiser Anheuser-Busch will be the top individual advertiser for the 12th straight year, media buyers say, but the auto category will have the most ads, as it did last year, when six companies bought ads.
The Super Bowl audience is an attentive one. Carat says audience retention during Super Bowl commercials is a remarkable 99.2 percent, making it by far the top sports event of the year in terms of ad views.
And a Nielsen study found that 51 percent of viewers tune into the game mainly for the commercials.
Over the past few years, these ads have also taken on new life after the game.
Dozens of web sites now offer replays of the game’s ads, as do mobile phone apps, and NFL Network and other cable channels run postgame specials focused on the ads. Plus many people record them on their DVRs and play them back.
Last year Snickers had the most replayed ad, according to TiVo, with Best Buy's ad getting replayed the second most.
This year many companies are also offering either extra ads online or extensions of the ones that will play during the game. GoDaddy has been doing this for years, posting a more risqué version of its ad online.
There’s always much talk about Super Bowl viewership, which has increased each of the last six years, all drawing more than 90 million viewers. This year's game could set a new record for the fifth straight year.
Last year's game averaged 111 million total viewers, making it the most-watched program in television history.
Because New York and Boston, which is home base to the Patriots, are both top-10 TV markets, and the two teams have huge followings, many are predicting this year's game will surpass 111 million.
That seems almost certain if you add in online viewership. The NFL will be showing the Super Bowl online for the first time ever.
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