Heed the stampede of Clydesdales: The Super Bowl, and its ubiquitous ad season, is upon us. The analysts at Kantar Media recently pulled together a pile of data on what the last decade of championship football has looked like on America’s TVs. Some of it is fairly well-publicized — ad costs have, for the most part, steadily increased to culminate in this year’s $3.7 to $3.8 million price tag for 30 seconds of airtime. But there are some other figures that reveal who is buying up the most ad time, and how it compares to years past.
Aside from the average cost, let’s begin with the most obvious: Beer and cars (and Mickey Mouse, but not all at the same time). Between 2003 and 2012, these companies made up 37% of all ad sales, with Anheuser Busch in the lead:
A beer company may come out on top of total cash spent, but the more interesting numbers lie in what car companies have been doing over the years. According to the stats, commercial time for all auto ads has increased, as has the number of parent companies and brands buying time:
Why the auto glut? According to Hyundai’s vice president of marketing in a recent New York Times article, it goes beyond the obvious need to make money — it’s all about when you make money. Super Bowl ads sell cars at the beginning of the year, making it less likely that an automaker will start slow and have to dig itself out for the next 10 or 11 months.
Moving on: we know what the commercial standbys are. But in 2012, spots that
weren’t bought out by Budweiser, Chevy and the like went to companies that are Super Bowl commercial virgins. Last year, 30% of all national Super Bowl ads were purchased by parent companies in the game for the first time:
Last year also set a recent record for the number of 60-plus second ads:
With all of this, it would seem like companies are spending more on Super Bowl ads than ever before. But the number of companies spending huge chunks of their ad budgets, which was increasing up until 2010, has actually decreased over the past two years:
Even so, Kantar Media notes that a couple of small players — Careerbuilder and Teleflora — invested a whopping 30% of their ad budget into one evening of television last year.
In general, though, companies spend far more on advertising during the Super Bowl than any other U.S. sporting event:
And as Slate’s Matthew Yglesias pointed out last year, it’s increasingly becoming the most-watched any event: four out of the top five highest-rated TV events at the time were Super Bowls (the other, of course, is the final episode of M*A*S*H). And Kantar explains that audience tuneaway rate during the average commercial for the 2012 Super Bowl was 0.7%, or seven out of every 1,000 viewers. A normal rate is around 3 to 4%.
So why wouldn’t you advertise if you could afford it? In theory, it seems like your money could be wisely spent elsewhere. Digiday did an experiment comparing how much $4 million could buy in digital ad sales. Instead of a minute of dancing hamsters, you could buy a week’s worth of homepage advertising on Yahoo, 200 pieces of BuzzFeed-sponsored content, or promote a Twitter trending topic for a month.
But what most companies are betting on is a combination of digital ads, viral marketing, and one big Super Bowl splash. It’s unlikely that you’ve missed at least one of the many attempts to grab your attention (and get you to grab your friends’ attention) over the past few weeks, as brands are increasingly releasing their campaigns early. They range from Axe raffling off a chance to go to space (seriously, and with the help of Buzz Aldrin); Budweiser joining Twitter (with not-so-subtle age disclaimers) to encourage you to name a baby Clydesdale; Pepsi’s crowdsourced halftime show; Doritos’ seventh annual “Crash the Super Bowl” ad contest; and the viral controversy over Volkswagen’s maybe-racist spot.
What matters is that we’re talking about, and sharing, all this information. Tomorrow, watch for more on the value of viral marketing and storytelling in addition to a pricey 30 second spot. And if you can’t get enough about the changing landscape of advertising, we’re kicking off a month-long Insight Center on that very topic Feb. 12.