When the Super Bowl kicks off Sunday, 40-plus advertisers will be hoping to win over the more than 110 million viewers tuning in. After paying $4.5 million for a 30-second spot, advertisers hope to have the ad everyone will be talking about Monday morning.
But Super Bowl ads are shrouded in misconceptions. Here are the myths we can safely debunk.
1. A Super Bowl ad isn’t worth the cost.
Super Bowl ads don’t come cheap. The $4.5 million price tag covers just the fee paid to the network hosting the game. Millions more can be spent on celebrity appearances, music licensing, agency fees and production.
“Most of them don’t work,” marketing professor Ira Kalb of the University of Southern California wrote in The Huffington Post. “They cost a lot and produce questionable returns to those that pay for them.”
Some studies have shown that as many as 80 percent of Super Bowl ads don’t increase purchases and people have a hard time recalling the brand associated with a Super Bowl ad they watched.
But on balance, the numbers indicate that a Super Bowl ad is worth the investment for the companies that can afford it — assuming the commercial is any good.
In 2014, a survey of 37,440 U.S. consumers by the tech firm BrandAds found that the average Super Bowl ad increased viewers’ likelihood of buying the product by 6.6 percent.
The number was far higher for the most popular spots, with Hyundai seeing a 39.5 percent lift and Budweiser scoring a 37.8 percent increase. Only 16 percent of brands created negative interest with their ads.
Similarly, a 2012 analysis of Super Bowl ad visibility by Kantar Media found that, in total, the ads generated $11 million of publicity for advertisers, with the top 10 spots accounting for $8.6 million of the total.
2. The most memorable ads are Super Bowl ads.
The phrase “Super Bowl ad” has become shorthand for the pinnacle of each year’s TV marketing.
In the pre-YouTube era, the Super Bowl truly was one of the few times you could expect to see big-budget, well-crafted ads. But today, agencies produce memorable ads throughout the year, often not tied to an event.
The link between quality commercials and Super Bowl commercials is so ingrained that people regularly misremember certain ads as Super Bowl ads.
For instance, Yahoo TV rated Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” as No. 7 on its list of the best Super Bowl spots ever made, but the ad didn’t appear during the Super Bowl. The ad debuted Feb. 4, 2010, three days before the Super Bowl.
3. Releasing an ad before the Super Bowl will steal its thunder.
“What we don’t want to do is destroy the magic of the spot by showing it beforehand,” Nissan marketing exec Fred Diaz recently told The Wall Street Journal.
Several brand marketers maintain that opinion, but many successful ads are released several days before the game.
Volkswagen’s “The Force” (with the Darth Vader kid) was released online the Wednesday before 2011’s Super Bowl and had a staggering 12 million-plus views before it aired on television.
Similarly, last year’s “Puppy Love” Budweiser ad went live four days before the game and was hailed by Adweek and the USA Today Ad Meter as the Super Bowl’s best commercial.
Airing a spot early can help a company prepare for potential backlash, as GoDaddy learned this week. The Web-hosting company pulled its original ad concept — a parody of “Puppy Love” — on Tuesday amid criticism that it was endorsing puppy mills. GoDaddy will run a different ad during the Super Bowl.
4. Prominent brands don’t need Super Bowl ads.
Most people already prefer Coke or Pepsi — or, if they’re indifferent on sodas, they are most certainly aware that these brands exist. Yet major brands go big with their advertising — and often see big returns.
A Stanford University study determined that Budweiser generates as much as $96 million from its Super Bowl advertising. Subtracting the costs of producing and placing the ads, researchers estimated the brewer’s return on investment at 172 percent.
The same study found that one of the biggest benefits of Super Bowl ads is that consumers learn to associate those brands with parties and other gatherings. But when two competitors advertised during the same game, the researchers found, the benefits were eroded, creating a sort of stalemate.
That might be what happened when Pepsi passed on the Super Bowl in 2010 to focus on social media and digital-marketing options. After that decision, Pepsi dropped from No. 2 behind Coca-Cola to No. 3 behind Diet Coke. Pepsi has returned as a Super Bowl advertiser ever since.
5. Sex sells.
“Sex sells on the Super Bowl.” That was GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons’s simple explanation for his company’s cleavage-centered ads.
Except it doesn’t. Judging from the lineup of ads revealed before Sunday’s game, Super Bowl salaciousness is on the decline.
An estimated 46 percent of Super Bowl viewers are women, and a 2013 study published in Psychological Science found that women have a negative reaction to sexualized ads, especially if the products are relatively low in cost.
Even GoDaddy might be absorbing the message, this year dropping its PG-13 shenanigans in favor of other odd scenarios, like bodybuilders racing toward a spray tan salon.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
