Surprising Superbowl Ad Strategies For Your Business
"Football is unconditional love."
Tom Brady
Hope you had a great Superbowl Sunday!
Did you know that Super Bowl Sunday is the second biggest snack day of the year? Second only to, you guessed it, New Years Eve.
Last year’s ads were terrible. This year’s weren’t much better.
Sigh. There’s always next year.
My question for you is this - if you had a $100 million marketing budget, would you pay $7 Million for a 30 second viewed by 100 million people?
It sounds impressive. Your brand would be viewed by a LOT of eyeballs. And if your agency did a great job, it would have many people talking about it over the coming days and weeks.
But let’s drill a bit deeper.
Of those 100 million people how many would actually be your target audience? And of those people in your target audience, how many would actually fit your ideal buyer profile?
Let’s look at Cheetos as an example. Those nuclear orange, crunchy snacks that retail for around $3 a bag.
Their Superbowl ad featured Ashton Kulcher and his wife playing a game of who-ate-my-Cheetos against the backdrop of the Shaggy soundtrack “it wasn’t me.”
Who is Cheetos’ target market? Apparently everyone who likes Ashton Kulcher and snacks.
That’s about the laziest market segmentation imaginable.
Ashton is a pretty well known actor and entrepreneur but it would be a considerable STRETCH to say that even the majority of the 100 million audience would be a fan of both him and the snack.
Will that ad result in a spike of Cheetos sales?
Unbelievably, that’s anyone’s guess, including their parent company PepsiCo.
Getting sales is secondary. Advertising in the Superbowl is really about showmanship and the coolness factor - inserting your brand into the national conversation, even if it’s for the briefest of moments.
If you create a great ad, your company will get free advertising for many years to come – like this Budweiser ad (my favorite) or this one from eTrade.
Get it wrong, (as the vast majority of this year’s advertisers did), then oops. $5.6 million plus production costs, agency costs, talent costs and internal costs - down the gurgler.
Lucky for you, you can extract some key learnings from this year’s Superbowl advertising mistakes.
My Key Superbowl Strategy Takeaways (That Also Apply To Your business)
The use of off-the-wall humor, or emotion through story-telling is what connects people to brands and makes them hit the share button.
Go big or go home. Safe messaging doesn’t work – you have to stand out. If you’re going to gamble $5.6 Million on an advertisement that you have no idea will actually bring sales, then you’d better make it share worthy.
Think, how can you leverage your investment in one big ad? Gone are the days where it’s about running one ad and that’s it. Think about how you can extract the most mileage from your big campaign investments. How about a teaser campaign, a post campaign and a sequel? What about paying influencers to tape themselves watching your ad and reacting to it? What about running competitions to see how people would change the ad, improve it, or create their own versions?
Superbowl Throwback – Do You Remember When.....The Miami Dolphins defeated the Washington Redskins in Superbowl VII, to become the first undefeated team in NFL history. (1973)
