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Digital Marketing Unfiltered on 08/16/2010
Ed: White Horse’s podcast series is a great way to get the unvarnished truth about all your digital marketing questions—listen to all of the episodes whenever you like. Below is Part Two of a recent three-part episode on Super Bowl advertising. You can also read “Are Ads Still the Best Part of the Super Bowl? (Part 1)” To have your question featured on a podcast, please send your question to contactus@whitehorse.com
Daniel: So with that said, I don't want to go against the grain. But maybe it does make a little sense. Maybe it makes sense if there's already hype on these $2.8 million for 30-second ads that won't show up until Super Bowl, but we also see it before then. Maybe it makes sense because after the buzz that you get on these TV commercials, it goes on for weeks and weeks.
What's the difference from going in this direction? Spending a lot of money, you still get the advertising you're looking for. And it makes sense because, for one reason, people are not… the price is not going down on these ads. So they're obviously continuing to go up every year, the amount of money you have to spend to get on television to do these ads. So maybe it does make sense; maybe there's something out there still viable.
Eric: It's an interesting point; you're basically saying you get a lot more efficiency out of the Super Bowl than you used to, because people are going to be able to watch the ads again and again online, and they're already doing that. So even though the cost goes up, the efficiency goes up, too.
Avery: But millions of dollars in media spend that's going directly to the network doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. When all of the traction and all of the buzz is actually happening prior to the airdate of these campaigns.
Jen: Yeah, I think that's going to be interesting to watch. Because the one kind of interesting nuance that made it so valuable was that, in fact, everyone was looking forward to that storyline as well: what was going to happen and what these commercials were going to be. So, early release being more prominent this year than last year, the commercials may actually devalue even further, which is going to make it hard for them to monetize it the way they need to. I mean, there's no doubt that it's probably one of the very few times when you can get that many people watching at the same time, and somehow we've marketed it to a level where they also are looking forward to seeing the commercials. But if we take out looking forward to seeing the commercials, what's that going to do to the price of those commercials? So it's been interesting to know that the strategy was early release. That, although it is causing legs, I think it is probably going to devalue the spots next year.
Brian: You responded negative, though, and you don't know when the spots are coming up, although I think I might be in the mind already of people who are like, "Quiet! The commercials are on!"
Jen: You know it! It's a total thread.
Eric: Especially depending on how the game goes. At halftime, I'm excited about that, so hopefully that will help the advertisers that Pete Townsend will be once again be doing the Windmill.
Eric: Yeah, and that ad's already been released, and the one that the guy's with The Who; I forget who the advertiser is.
Jen: I'm just wondering, and you probably know this already in the social space, Jamie. I'm like who's going to win? Gene Simmons or Clark Griswold? Who's the comeback?
Jamie: You know, I haven't actually monitored that, so I have no comment.
Avery: No comment at this time.
Eric: One of the things that's interesting about Super Bowl advertising historically, is that it's creativity causes a problem for itself, because it hasn't been well integrated with online. I mean, Pepsi's decided to do something where it's highly participatory. You know that opportunity's been available all along. Not to blow our own horn or anything, but nine years ago White Horse did this integrated campaign with AT&T and the Super Bowl, where AT&T was revealed as the company behind this big teaser campaign. And everybody found this out at halftime during the Super Bowl and flooded the Web site, and we had this big promotion and everything. That was nine years ago. In the meantime, I think Super Bowl advertisers, for the most part, they just slapped the URL up there, and invited people to come to the Web. Now there are things like crowd‑sourcing and viral videos and so on; it's more participatory, but that's been slow. It's only been in the last two years that we've seen really good integration of Super Bowl advertising and online.
Jamie: But hasn't that been the degradation of the TV model, right? So as that has broken down the metrics, and everything that goes with it took a long time to unravel. So we were very much ahead of our time in terms of where the industry was ready to accept and be able to measure.
Eric: Right, and I think that actually had a lot to do with the bifurcation of the agency model. You had these very traditional offline agencies developing these Super Bowl ads; they didn't really know how to use digital; they weren't really talking to the digital shops, and so until that cultural wall was broken down the things weren't well integrated.
Jen: I'm surprised we haven't seen more of those since then.
Read Part One of "Are Ads Still the Best Part of the Super Bowl?”
Tags: Media planning & buying, online brand development
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