Widgets and Super Bowl Ads

Has the viral power of widgets increased or decreased the value of a Super Bowl ad? 

The arugment for why the value of a Super Bowl ad has gone up goes something like this:

It used to be that buying a Super Bowl ad meant exposing your advertising message to a massive audience in one thirty or sixty second block.  If your ad was good, people might talk about it at the water cooler the next day, and maybe tell their friends about it.  Within a few weeks, all would most likely be forgotten.

In recent years, companies such as web host Go Daddy have been able to extend their Super Bowl bounce by making their ads available on their own site.  So instead of just talking about the ad, people could pass the link to the Go Daddy site on to their friends, or find it via Google. 
 

Those who believe that widgets are adding value to Super Bowl ads probably think that 2007 is going to rewrite the book on the value of a (good) Super Bowl ad.  It's conceivable that the best ads are going to propagate like no commercial message we've ever seen before.  Every advertiser will have their ad available on YouTube minutes after they show up on TV, and publishers of all kinds will make these clips available to their audiences.  Widgets will empower a virtual army of web publishers - bloggers, MySpacers, online communities - to try and tap into the Super Bowl hype, in the process propagating the cleverest and most controversial ad messages.  By lengthening and exaggerating the impact of buying a Super Bowl ad, widgets can be seen as significantly improving the ROI of a Super Bowl spend.

But there's also another school of thought on this.  If you believe in the Snowball Effect, advertisers shouldn't have to dish out the dough for a Super Bowl ad for this chance to propagate their message.  For example, despite the bizarre efforts of the Anheuser-Busch legal team, a search for "Real Men of Genius" shows how a clever ad message can spread around the Web.  This is a campaign that was launched by a few radio spots - hardly the investment of a Super Bowl ad.

So which is it?  Is 2007 the best year to buy a Super Bowl ad or the worst year, all other things being equal?  I guess I tend to lean towards it being a great year.  Snowballs need to start somewhere, and it seems to me that a Super Bowl launch gives your commercial message a better chance to blow up than only relying on word of mouth.

The other point here is that Super Bowl ads are considered more than ads - they've achieved the advertising utopia of being considered part of the content, and in some cases, the primary content.  Commercial messages in other settings just don't have that same legitimacy.  By spending the money to put your message on during the Super Bowl, you are buying the right to be part of the show.

There was a bizarre meme floating around Silicon Valley for a while among some Web 2.0 fundamentalist VCs that said "if you have to advertise, you're doing something wrong."  I thought it was pretty foolish to throw out 100 years of marketing learning just because a handful of companies got very, very big without advertising.

What's not foolish is to enhance your commercial message by making sure it harnesses all of the social media tools available - like getting it up on YouTube.  It will be interesting to see if the TV networks can cash in on the widget-enabled value add of these commercial messages by raising their prices.   

Comments

[Ming]

You make some interesting points. The idea that you can take a Super Bowl ad and extend it's shelf life through widgets and sites like YouTube is right on.

However, Pat Coyle has some compeling arguments as to why dollar for dollar (not everyone can spend 3-5 million on 30 sec ads) there may be better alternatives. These alternatives can also take advantage of the viral marketing, widgets and YouTube.

http://www.patcoyle.net/2007/01/23/coltscom-best-value-for-super-bowl-ads/

Of course, if you got the money, why not buy a Super Bowl spot?

[Kenny]

Super Bowl ads will always be popular as it's become common for people to watch the games "just for the adds".

If a company can afford it, making a funny ad and playing it during the super bowl is great marketing.

[lawrence]

Ming, I like the way you put that - extending shelf life is exactly what widgets do for a good ad campaign. But the question remains - all other things remaining equal (sales, cost, ad budget, etc) - is 2007 a better year to buy a Super Bowl spot than 2005 because of this additional shelf life? Or, does the presence of viral marketing tools make the huge investment of a Super Bowl ad an unnecessary investment?

[Ming]

If all things equal and you have the budget. I would say that a Super Bowl ad in 2007 would still be a good buy.

Let's say you pay somewhere around 4.5 M for production costs and a 30 sec spot. Nielsen put the estimated viewers at around 90 M. That puts your cost at around a nickel per pair of eyes.

Now, someone puts the ad on a video sharing site and it goes viral... That's not a bad buy at all.

Taking your snowball reference. The quality of the ad is the height of the hill (or mountain) which determines the possible impact. The size of the snowball would be the # of viewers. The Super Bowl ad would set the initial size of the snowball and the chance that someone will come by and push the ball down the hill.

Of course, this assumes you produce a killer ad that everyone want's to see.

[lawrence]

That's an interesting point about good ads versus bad ads, Ming. If the cost of a super bowl ad does in fact creep up as tv networks look to cash in on the post super bowl propagation potential, there will be some serious pressure for advertisers / ad agencies to come up with viral / quality / controversial stuff. Before, a bad ad and a good ad got about the same exposure. With the YouTube + Widget exposure, a good ad's exposure should dwarf that of a poorly conceived ad. It's very easy to imagine a great ad earning a fantastic return on invesmtent, and a lousy ad being disastrous from a cost to eyeballs standpoint.

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