Like clockwork, every January, as the National Football League season winds down and anticipation builds for the next Super Bowl, there will be a news story about the latest eye-gouging and frankly unbelievable cost for a 30-second advertisement during the game. In 2024 the figure had climbed to $7 million for the time, and you can bet the big brands like Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, and global auto makers spent well into an additional seven figures producing those commercials.
In terms of raw audience numbers, that is undoubtedly an attractive buy. Nielsen reports more than 123 million people watched the overtime thriller between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers. The close game made the commercials even more compelling in terms of having viewers’ attention during a game where taking a bathroom break was a risk, for fear of missing an important play.
Despite that captive audience, there are a couple of larger reasons why I’d never steer my advertising and marketing clients toward those all-in, big-gamble media buys that could eat up their ad budget for most of the year. One is that tastes and audience sensibilities can be fickle, and if you go to the trouble and monstrous expense of a big media buy or sponsorship opportunity, it’s often worse odds than a coin flip that the campaign will land with your desired audience in a meaningful way.
It might be too on the nose to use a football analogy in a post about the Super Bowl, but I’m going for it anyway. For all but the biggest of brands with annual advertising budgets that are well into the nine figures, playing in the big event ad and sponsorship market is like trying to win a football game by throwing a Hail Mary pass into a backfield full of defenders. High risk, with a chance of success that hovers pretty close to zero.
Clients who have worked with me already know that my approach to marketing is built on the blocking and tackling basics of smart, consistent – in industry lingo we call it programmatic – messaging over long periods of time to carefully selected audiences.
Rather than a Hail Mary pass, it’s like Woody Hayes’ old “three yards and a cloud of dust” approach to winning – slow but unstoppable. With the great creative that we deliver for all broadcast options and a game plan of putting those spots in the right places at high frequency, your business builds the impressions and awareness needed to become the front-of-mind choice whenever your customers, new and old, need what you’re ready to deliver.
And if it seems odd for a proud Texas Longhorn to reference a Big Ten coach for business inspiration, it’s only because that’s somehow easier than giving any credit to now-former Alabama coach Nick Saban for his 21st-century domination of college pigskin. As you might guess, I haven’t watched any college football championship games lately, either.