A Super Bowl
primer for media buyers
What you need to know about Sunday's big game
By Toni Fitzgerald
Feb 1, 2010
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 Indianapolis Colts, aiming for their second Super Bowl win in four years, are favored slightly over the New Orleans Saints, who are making their first appearance in the game.
Second, there is a commercial controversy. Unlike past years, this one has nothing to do with Go Daddy.
On Friday, CBS rejected an ad from gay dating site ManCrunch.com that showed two men making out.
The site, anticipating that the ad might be rejected, has begun a campaign to get the ad on, pointing to CBS's decision to greenlight an anti-abortion ad from Focus on the Family as an example of network double standards.
As of this morning, CBS was standing by its decision, but in the end ManCrunch may not need to spend the money on the ad. It's already been widely screened on the internet, and the site has seen its traffic double over recent days since word of the controversy began.
Those two points aside, 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 Miami on CBS.
According to Kantar Media, the average 30-second spot for the game sold for between $2.5 million to $2.8 million, down from last year's record $3 million on NBC.
That underscores the still-sad state of the media economy. It's only the second time in recent memory that Super Bowl ad prices have fallen year to year.
Some longtime advertisers, including FedEx and Pepsi, are foregoing the game, fearing in part that spending scads of money on a one-off Super Bowl stunt will send the wrong message at a time when thousands remain out of work and the Haiti earthquake is still so fresh.
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 not yet been 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, companies became more cautious. There will be dot.coms advertising this year, but probably not as many as the more than a dozen who bought time a decade ago.
This year, it looks as though humor will be the overriding creative theme. Anheuser-Busch, Hyundai, McDonald's, HomeAway and other brands are hoping big laughs will bring them big results.
For the third year in a row, movie studios are expected to be heavy advertisers, with Universal Studios most recently confirming that it will run a spot for the new "Harry Potter" film. Last year movie studios were also big advertisers, with four buying time, and no wonder.
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 HomeAway and Focus on the Family, are running their first-ever Super Bowl spots.
Longtime big game advertiser Anheuser-Busch will be the top individual advertiser for the 10th straight year, media buyers say.
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 recent 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. Last year Careerbuilder.com's "Get a New Job" spot drew 3 million online views, the most of any ad, according to TubeMogul, with Doritos' "The Power of Crunch" drawing 2.6 million.
And GoDaddy had the most-replayed ad of the game on TiVo.
This year many companies are also offering either extra ads online or extensions of the ones that will play during the game, such as HomeAway's "National Lampoon's Vacation"-themed mini-movie that reunites the cast of that classic film.
There’s always much talk about Super Bowl viewership, which has increased each of the last four years, all drawing more than 90 million viewers. Everyone expects this year's game to set a new record for the third straight year.
Last year's game averaged 98.7 million total viewers, making it the most-watched program in television history.
Despite the fact that New Orleans and Indianapolis are not top-10 television markets, many are predicting this game will approach 100 million.
The Colts have one of football's biggest stars, quarterback Peyton Manning. And there's a lot of public sentiment with the Saints, who have become a symbol of hope for a region ravaged by Hurricane Katrina four years ago.
Plus, football ratings have been way up this year during the regular and post season, with last weekend's NFC championship on Fox drawing nearly 60 million viewers.
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