Super Bowl 50: Why Was it an Important Platform for Brands?
February 9, 2016
Once again the Super Bowl proved that events off the field were almost as important as those on it as major brands spent big on adverts to maximise their exposure on the biggest stage.
On the field, cialis the Denver Broncos defeated the Carolina Panthers at the Levi Stadium in San Francisco to claim Super Bowl 50, erectile but who were the winners in the advertising stakes?
Brands such as Hyundai, T-Mobile, Budweiser, Doritos and Mountain Dew paid up to $5 million for 30-second spots during the game, with countless marketing techniques also used across various platforms including social and digital media.
$5m for a 30-second advert is certainly a huge amount of money but it shows the value brands put on the Super Bowl and its unique ability to reach millions of people worldwide.
Super Bowl commercials have come a long way over the years and are seen by many as being almost as important as the game itself as they are viewed by a large TV audience in America and worldwide.
The audience figures for the game showed that it was the third most viewed Super Bowl in history, with 111.9 million viewers on TV, behind last year’s encounter between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks on NBC and the 2014 Super Bowl.
Digital ratings, despite not being revealed, were also expected to break records, as this year’s Super Bowl was available free, for the first time, on over-the-top (OTT) Internet devices like Apple TV.
All the ads in the Super Bowl TV broadcast were also featured in the digital streams as well, which was another first.
The game also drew big numbers on social media with some 200 million posts, comments or likes on Facebook during the game, and 3.9 million Tweets during the halftime show that starred Coldplay, Beyonce and Bruno Mars, Facebook and Twitter said.
Misha Sher, Head of Sport & Entertainment, EMEA, at global media agency Mediacom, believes the large investments by brands for the advertising slots is good value because of the viewership they reach in America, the largest consumer market.
“Super Bowl is an ideal platform for brands because it transcends sport and is a cultural phenomenon,” he said.
“It’s by the far the single biggest viewership event in the world’s biggest consumer market, not to mention other parts of the world where Super Bowl is watched. What’s unique about commercials is that they have become as famous as the actual game so people actually look forward to seeing them.
“I can’t imagine another scenario where people actually anticipate the commercials. Furthermore, given the way fans engage around the game and the content of commercials, brands are guaranteed to be at the heart of the conversation, with their commercials commented on and shared all across social and digital channels.
“They are able to drive substantial value from earned media so the investment, however high it may seem, is actually very good value for money.”
Rupert Pratt, Managing Partner of specialist sport and entertainment agency Generate Sponsorship, says that the PR and social value of the Super Bowl adverts has become higher than the value of the advertising itself due to the buzz and engagement this creates instantly.
“It’s a destination event from an advertising perspective so there’s very few moments in the year when you own the nation so to speak, from an interest perspective, so the premium is so much higher because of the fact that the whole country is engaged in that moment,” said Pratt.
“There are very few occasions when you can have the whole of the country focused in on one moment and you’ve got the opportunity to create a huge amount of buzz and ownership and that’s why brands pay so much money.
“The really interesting thing now is that the brands themselves use these ads as platforms for social media and digital buzz and much broader and wider engagement and almost the PR and social value nowadays you get out of the slot, is higher than the value of the actual advertising itself, which again is just because of this anticipation and the hype that’s created around it.
“It’s relatively unique in the sense that it’s become a destination moment in its own right above and beyond the actual event itself.”
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