This coming Sunday marks the annual festival of television advertising. It’s that one big Sunday every year where CMOs pull out the checkbook and in a single stroke spend somewhere between $3.5 million and $4 million for 30 seconds of airtime. That doesn’t include the estimated hundreds of thousands per spot in PR dollars to promote the ads to the general public, employees, Wall Street, and just about anyone who will listen, watch, read, like, post, or tweet about the effort.
As in previous years, part of the television advertising festival will include a football game played between the commercials.
With each passing year, the Super Bowl has become less of a sporting event and more of a marketing bowl—not that there’s anything wrong with that, because if we want to know who’s responsible for the current state of the situation all we have to do is look in the mirror. So, the game itself is almost secondary to the stories swirling around about what the official sponsors and advertisers will be doing to come up with a new way to reach viewers and engage them in some way on behalf of their respective brands.
How is Volkswagen going to top that cute Darth Vader spot?
While I haven’t done any quantitative analysis, I would bet that there’s more media space and time devoted to the commercials and marketing antics of the sponsors than to the game itself.
Some advertisers begin weeks in advance teasing the public about what they’ll be doing. Some offer previews of their television spots, some invite the public to create the spots, and all, of course, invite participation before, during, and after the game via social media.
This Sunday should be the showcase of marketing innovation, or at least one of the P’s of marketing. Here’s hoping we see something worth writing about next week. And maybe the game will be pretty good too.
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