Author: Gretchen Gavett

An edited interview with Robert Z. Lawrence, the Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the co-author of the 2012 Harvard Business Review article “Shattering the Myths About U.S. Trade Policy.”

President Obama emphasized reinvigorating American manufacturing in his State of the Union address, as well as boosting American exports. What do you make of his proposal?

The idea is important because we need demand in this economy in order to create jobs. Domestic demand is being constrained because our government is trying to get its fiscal house in order. Housing is depressed. Consumers are tapped out.

When you look around and ask where you get growth in this economy, one logical place to look is exports. That’s well chosen as an objective. But when it comes to achieving the goal of doubling exports in five years [a goal Obama outlined in his 2010 State of the Union speech], we already did the easy part: because our exports were so depressed due to the global financial crisis, we saw growth in the first couple of years. But if you look at the last year, global financial exports have been very disappointing. He’s not going to achieve his goal.

The real problem is slow growth in the rest of the world. At the end of the day, our exports are very dependent on two things, neither of which we have very good control over. The first is how rapidly our trading partners grow; a European crisis is not good for us. Slowdown in China and elsewhere is also not good for us.

The second big driver in our exports is our exchange rate — and not necessarily our exchange rate vis-à-vis China, which a lot of people point to. The truth is, we don’t actually compete much with China in our export markets; it’s mainly with the Europeans, the Canadians, the Japanese. We’re selling sophisticated machinery, and so are the Japanese and Europeans.

What about Obama’s emphasis on manufacturing and infrastructure?

The concrete thing I heard is that we want to improve our infrastructure, which is a good idea for a number of reasons — and it does raise costs to some degree for our exports. He also mentioned a plan for some sort of a stimulus to technological innovation, starting these manufacturing centers [like the one in Youngstown, Ohio].

That will make a contribution marginally, in my view. The real core questions are things like the way we tax companies. There is sort of a consensus that what we need to do is lower the corporate tax rate. In fact we have the worst of all worlds because we have a high tax rate at 35%, and then we give the firms a lot of deductions. At the margin, if you’re thinking about the next dollar, it’s going to be taxed at a high rate, and that discourages investment in the United States. And it discourages companies from bringing their money back to the United States.

It does seem to me that tax reform is a critical component of making ourselves more competitive.

He mentioned the tax code briefly in his speech, but do you think Obama has paid close enough attention to corporate tax reform in general?

This is an area where there could perhaps be a meeting of the minds between what the Republicans want and Obama wants. He has spoken about trying to get rid of the tax breaks that the oil companies get, for example. But I think we need a concrete proposal and leadership in that area. …

In an ideal world, what would that concrete plan look like?

You’re corporate tax rate would be 20, 25%, and then the allowances and all the special parts of the program that allow for deductions would be eliminated.

There’s also a very complex problem at the moment in the sense that companies keep their money abroad to escape U.S. taxation, and so that also needs to be confronted. Ideally, with a lower marginal rate, companies would have more incentive to bring it home, but you need to have some kind of program in place as well.

In your March 2012 HBR article, you unpack three myths about U.S. trade policy. Where do they sit now? Let’s start with the first myth: that an open trade policy is the cause of manufacturing job losses.

We’re still debating this one. … I really don’t think manufacturing is the answer to our jobs problem. We’ve done studies where we look and say, how many jobs are embodied in the trade deficit? And we get a number like 2 million. That sounds like a lot of jobs.

But we have something like 150 million people in the U.S. labor force. So even a resilient manufacturing sector will not make a huge difference to our employment problems. That can only be solved with stimulating total spending within the economy. Demand is deficient and you need a strategy to fix that.

And even if we see a revitalization of the manufacturing sector, basically it’s going to be built on high-tech and it’s going to require high-skilled workers. The workers who were displaced are not going to be the ones who are re-employed in manufacturing, by and large, unless they have those skills.

Obama says we need to educate people so they can work these high-skilled jobs. But is this push not really going to solve the problem?

I think that 90% of the new jobs are actually not going to be in manufacturing. Yes, people need to get skills, but they aren’t necessarily skills that are in manufacturing. What I missed in his speech was the strategy for the other 90% of the labor force.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against stimulating manufacturing and stimulating exports and so on. But a jobs strategy has to be based on aggregate demand throughout the economy.

If exports are the future, some of the jobs may well come in manufacturing. But a lot of them will be in services. One-third of all our exports are services. In fact, we don’t have a trade deficit in services. We’re highly competitive in services. But we’re still sort of looking in the rearview mirror when it comes to thinking about the structure of the economy.

While trade is part of the story, it’s a relatively small part of the story as compared with the combination of rapid productivity in the growth of manufacturing — which means we need fewer and fewer workers — and the productivity that brings down the price of goods. But consumers aren’t responsive enough to that falling price; what they do is that, when goods get cheaper, they buy services.

That’s the big issue that’s not recognized. Your iPhone got cheaper, but what did you do with your iPhone? You bought a whole lot of apps and paid Verizon for your telephone services. You’ve got a nice, big flat screen HD TV. But where’s your money going? It’s going to the cable company.

So the relative role of spending on goods is falling. Consumers are devoting more of their money to services. That’s just a fact of life.

What about the second myth: that U.S. standards of living are falling and wage inequality is rising because of competition from developing countries?

The big story in inequality in the United States, and particularly in the last five years, is not between skilled workers and unskilled workers. All workers are doing poorly compared to profits. The big story is profits.

Another part of the story is the incomes of the very wealthy. It’s a different kind of an inequality that you would expect if it was inequality based on competition with low-wage, emerging market economies.

I don’t think that the dominant source of that inequality is the global force. It may have something to do with it, but the bigger factor is that we have a deeply depressed economy and a deeply depressed labor market.

Then there’s the third myth: that growth in emerging markets like China and India are why we have higher oil prices?

I still think that the dominant story, if you take the big picture, is a failure of supply in developed countries to grow. And that is changing, particularly in respect to the U.S. We are moving much closer to becoming self-sufficient in oil.

Most Americans are worried about the high prices, and that won’t be solved by United States self-sufficiency. Even if we weren’t importing oil, our market would still be linked to the world market. If there’s some problem in the Middle East that leads to higher oil prices, prices would still rise in the United States for gasoline as well. Otherwise, Americans would just ship the oil out.

So we don’t buy protection from higher oil prices by being self-sufficient, but we do keep the money at home. And that’s a difference.

Between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, U.S. television is replete with two things: football and jewelry ads. They operate seamlessly, the “Every Kiss Begins with Kay” cadence or “He went to Jared!” catchphrase blasting during almost every NFL commercial break (trust me, I counted).

No matter the brand, each advertisement leans on the same sluggishly tired trope: the surprised female jewelry recipient — one half of a uniformly heterosexual couple — lured into a romantic adventure. She receives something shiny. She gasps!

As we begin our month-long Insight Center on the future of advertising, which features the cutting-edge of the industry, these commercials raise an important counterperspective about marketing: when is innovation in advertising a detriment?

After all, people are still buying jewelry from the brands that make the most irritating ads: over the holidays, sales at Sterling Jewelers stores, which include Kay and Jared, did rise 4.7%. And the share price at Signet Jewelers, the stores’ parent company, rose by $4.87.

Even as diamond retail itself has evolved — with low-cost entrants like Blue Nile potentially threatening established retailers like Tiffany — innovators and incumbents alike still tell the same story. And they even stick to the same places: Tiffany has locked down the top right corner of page 3 in the New York Times for more than 100 years. If a diamond is forever, so, it seems, are the advertisements for them.

Brands from Cartier to Kay still use the same formula that De Beers and the N.W. Ayer ad agency came up with in the 1970s. As highlighted in Edward Jay Epstein’s classic 1982 Atlantic article, “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?” De Beers, faced with fluctuating global prices and a “buy smaller diamonds” ad campaign that went a little too well, ordered their ad agency to reframe the discussion. N.W. Ayer was charged with coming up with a campaign that would tie value to a ring containing a good-sized rock.

The agency’s research found that an element of surprise was key, but not because women needed to be swept off their feet. Rather, they felt guilty about buying something so “flashy, gaudy, overdone.” But if a man did the dirty work, leaving women in the “the semi-passive role” akin to “sex relations in a Victorian novel,” a woman “can easily feel that diamonds are ‘vulgar’ and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry.” In N.W. Ayer’s crude argument, your lady just has to lie there.

On the flip side, men, as the main purchasers of diamond rings, needed to be “moved to part with earnings not by the value, aesthetics, or tradition of diamonds but by the expectation that a ‘gift of love’ would enhance his standing in the eyes of a woman.” And women could feel guiltless about wearing a giant diamond, as long as the ring was a symbol of her “status and achievements” — that is, landing a man who could afford to surprise her. In essence, N.W. Ayers and De Beers needed to nudge men and women into a tacit agreement to value emotion over market price.

It worked: the element of “surprise,” according to Epstein, “helped De Beers expand its sales of diamonds in the United States to more than $2.1 billion, at the wholesale level, compared with a mere $23 million in 1939.”

More than 30 years later, the “gasp” is evidence that this trope is alive and well. And it’s not just male ring-purchasers who have bought in to the storyline: according to a recent Tampa Bay Times article, 53 percent of women said they would end a relationship if they didn’t receive a gift on Valentine’s Day. And in a David’s Bridal survey, 57% of brides wished their rocks were bigger.

The problem with product narratives that place a high value on feelings is that, when the thing is actually used (or worn), the value diminishes dramatically. The value of your diamond — i.e. the two months of salary you shelled out for it — suddently disappears. This is why it’s so hard to sell old diamonds, why my “estate” engagement ring was a heck of a bargain, and why irritating jewelry advertising is here to stay.

“Diamonds, without their association to romance, cannot be self-sustaining,” Jonah Sachs, the author of the book Winning the Story Wars, told me. He and I both looked for examples of rebellious diamond marketing, to no avail.

In fact, when companies do try to slightly alter the narrative to make more out of this storytelling tradition, consumers get creeped out. This ad for Kay struck many viewers as more suitable for an episode of Criminal Minds than as an ad for romance:

There are a few television ads out there that don’t use any storyline at all. For instance, this is what marketing diamonds as things — not emotions — really looks like:

But in a sense, even low-budget spots like this one depend on the diamond-as-surprise-love-gift narrative inflated by De Beers. Because diamonds, as evidenced by the Jewelry Exchange’s sparkling handfuls, are actually quite common.

An edited interview with Harvard Business School professor and leadership historian Nancy F. Koehn.

Pope Benedict XVI just resigned, citing age and poor health. Aside from the whole “no pope has resigned in the past 600 years” thing, why is this important in the grand scheme of how we understand work and leadership? …

Lesson number one is about the importance of endurance and physical stamina, and the ability to keep one’s self and one’s energy at a high, healthy level on a very consistent basis. It’s amazing how hard that is — and it isn’t specific to Pope Benedict XVI. This is about everyone else as well, and we don’t talk about it very much. Except when the president of the United States’ annual physical comes out, we don’t talk about how physically, mentally, and emotionally strong a leader has to be to sit at these tables that have so much on them.

Lesson number two is more about how extraordinarily difficult effective leadership is. The pope stepping down for health reasons is something we all pay attention to because he’s the pope and he’s a leader for well over a billion people. His job is hard. It’s not hard just because there’s abuse and scandal within the organization.

At one level this resignation feels really distant, and at other, when you really peel it down, it’s not. It’s about how much is on leaders’ plates and how much that’s not going to change. Quite the opposite: he’s stepping down because it’s not like it’s going to get better tomorrow.

So what’s the answer for leaders who are older, who are sick, who are tired? Is it to step down when you feel like you can no longer do it anymore? Or is there an increased pressure to keep working as long as you can?

I don’t think this is primarily about age. I think it’s really about energy and enthusiasm and a kind of physical, moral, intellectual, and emotional verve — an appetite. It’s something that every leader is responsible for maintaining and feeding.

If it’s reading Keats’ poetry or dancing the tango every other Tuesday night or listening to a great symphony or if it’s being a D.J. once a week — if that is what keeps a pope or a CEO or a president or a missionary fresh and fed and fueled, then by god that is on their plate and part of their responsibility as a leader.

That doesn’t just mean getting on the treadmill for an hour every morning. It means rehabbing and refreshing your heart, your sense of humor, and your recovery. It’s not recovery every eight months; it’s not two weeks in Nantucket. …

Pope Benedict XVI is someone who has probably looked himself in the mirror and looked at his predecessors — no one else has done this — and said, “For me, I need to do this. Because I’m taking an honest look at my physical and mental and spiritual balance sheet, and I don’t have enough assets right now.”

In some ways, it’s an act of great responsibility. Of really responding to his spiritual duty.

Backing up a bit, why don’t we talk about how hard it is to be a good leader?

Because we want to believe, on some very romantic level, that leaders are born. That they’re superhuman. That they’re cut from special cloth, that they’ve descended from Mount Olympus to help all of us. We want to believe that because it gets us excited about signing up to work with them. It kindles our hope that people with power have a sense of great responsibility and have answers that we don’t see.

There are good things about this inclination, this cognitive dissonance. But it’s not real.

There’s something equally valuable, equally inspirational about taking that page of the textbook out — “leaders are born and they’re special” — and instead reading the page that says “leaders are made as much as they’re born, maybe more so, and that they’re made in unexpected ways. And that they recognize how human they really are.” That is what allows us to relate to them, follow them, and pick up their gauntlet. And it also shows us what people are capable of in terms of leading from the better angels of their nature. …

There are very few “positions for life” left — the pope, tenured professors, and U.S. Supreme Court justices seem to be the holdouts. Does his decision further change the “have one job until you retire or die” narrative?

It does change it. If you think about something like tenure, for example, there are a lot of forces pressing against the idea of lifelong job security. At many institutions, they’re chipping away at the original rationale behind tenure — which is giving people who write and teach the freedom to say what they need to say.

There are these new pressures on institutions and the people who lead them that start to suggest new paradigms and structures being built in the wake of things like the destruction of lifelong jobs. I suspect we’ll see some more of this around the Supreme Court over the next 10 years, or at least debate over it.

And there’s going to be debate now about the pope and how he’s chosen. And we have to ask ourselves: Can we afford, in the broad sense, to give people a position for life when it appears that there is so much intensifying turbulence and change everywhere? We’re talking about turbulence as the new normal and, really, whether any job or position can be granted for life within all that.

Back before the Interwebs, part of the suspense of the Super Bowl was not knowing what Budweiser or Chevy had up their 30-second sleeves. But times have changed, and there’s generally no escaping the teasers or crowdsourcing that are now part of the language of modern advertising. Want to help name a baby Clydesdale? Or win a chance to go to space? Super Bowl XLVII already has you covered.

Aside from being entertaining, controversial, or overtly sexual, what’s the value of all this effort? I turned to Thales Teixeira and Jonah Sachs for some answers. Teixeira is an assistant professor of marketing at Harvard Business School whose latest research involves Web-based facial tracking in order to measure why, when, and how much you should entertain your customers in ads. Sachs is the author of the book Winning the Story Wars and the cofounder and CEO of Free Range Studios.

But before going into the powerful nature of viralness and storytelling, it’s worth taking a step back to answer a building block question.

What makes ads successful?

Two things, says Teixeira: “they have to grab attention; then they have to persuade.” The former is a bit tricky, what with DVR and the prevalence of second screens. So how do you get people to actually watch your ad the whole way through? Teixeira offers one possible solution: “You can either put the good content upfront, or you can create a shorter ad, a 15 second ad, and show it to them. Then when they like it, they’re more likely to watch the 60-second ad.”

“In a sense, it’s an ad for an ad.”

We’ve gone meta, which is important. The ad for the ad, of course, could be the preview, teaser, or crowdsourcing that ramps up in the weeks before and after the Super Bowl. When you have an ad for an ad, you’re doing more than telling a 30-second story.

You’re building brand buzz. And the Super Bowl is the perfect time to re-up how a brand defines itself.

“You’re trying to create a clear association between your brand and a certain kind of feeling or a certain kind of style or a certain kind of approach,” explains Jonah Sachs. “The goal is to sort of announce whatever your new or slightly tweaked brand position is.” And while ad agencies are interested in winning awards and such, brand managers are watching to see “if the ad moves the needle of brand perception.”

A good example of this is Hyundai’s recently released spot, in which the car company pairs up with the Flaming Lips for an “Epic Playdate”:

Hyundai’s VP of marketing, Steve Shannon, explained the message to Billboard: “The Flaming Lips are very much like Hyundai. They’re a little offbeat. They’ve been around a long time and they continue to reinvent themselves.”

But there can be pitfalls in this model.

“Because of that dynamic — that people actually are watching and are discussing, and there’s such a fierce competition to “win” — a lot of brands have to go off message a little bit in order to be heard,” Sachs told me “You don’t have a lot of chance to do much with your brand except sort of wave your hands faster and be louder than the other guy. It’s so necessary that that drives engagement, because it doesn’t actually do the same kind of brand building that a regular advertisement would.”

A good example of this is the Pepsi campaign that aired in 2011. The year prior, the company chose not to air a Super Bowl commercial; instead, they put $20 million into the Pepsi Refresh social media campaign, which focused on giving out grants for health, environmental, social, educational, and cultural causes. Their statement, says Sachs, was “we don’t need ads. We can do good for the world.”

Fast-forward a year, when they came out with this:

“You watch it and you’re like, wow,” explains Sachs. They went from changing the world to “totally the opposite: just laugh at this, which has nothing to do with that brand positioning. It sort of becomes a giant exercise in wasteful thinking and brand destruction.”

So what about participatory ads, like the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl campaign?

In some cases, this actually makes more sense than working with an ad agency. “The crowd has sort of beaten the average Madison Avenue approach in the last few years with the Doritos campaigns,” says Sachs. And there are two parts to why this works. The more obvious one is that sometimes fans are more passionate than ad agencies about a product. But the other is more about the narrative being created around how the ad is made.

As Sachs explained to me: It’s not so much, “OK, Doritos is building its brand because this ad with the dog is so funny. It’s about the story it tells about Doritos as a participatory brand, as a youth brand. It says that people are so passionate about Doritos that they’re going to make an ad about how passionate people are about Doritos. And then everybody thinks, yeah, this is cool.”

“The story of the way it’s created is as much a story as the ad itself.”

But at almost $4 million for a spot, is it worth it?

Maybe, if you do viral right. With the Super Bowl, Teixeira explained to me, you have one key aspect of a successful ad: quantity. Millions of people could be watching your brand. But does that mean people are engaging with the ad? Not necessarily. And that’s where online videos and other promotions come in.

“People are engaged with content online because they self-select: They choose to view an online ad versus TV, where they’re passive,” he said. “So if you combine Super Bowl with viral, you get the quantity of exposure of Super Bowl and the quality of engagement of viral content.” And the latter is, comparatively, extremely cheap. “If you get a successful viral ad,” notes Teixeira, “it sort of pays for itself.”

[For more on how Lipton Brisk scored a win using this model, read this HBS case study he regularly teaches.]

It’s also important to remember that the ramp-down may be more important than the ramp-up to the Super Bowl.

“People have this idea of this snowball effect of viral ads,” says Teixeira. “You see the ad. You send it to three people. Each person sends it to two or three other people. And then each person, so on and so forth. And then over short periods of time, you have millions and millions of people who have watched it.”

Putting an ad out there and having it go viral on its own would be nice, right? But it’s probably not going to happen that way because you’re likely not starting with enough material: “If you get a handful of snow and throw it down a hill, it’s just going to stop,” he points out. But if you already have a ball started — and say that ball is called the Super Bowl — you’re in a much better position.

“The Super Bowl gives you a huge amount of people, at the onset, which is essentially you creating a big snowball,” explains Teixeira. Then momentum kicks in from a variety of sources — “it’s not just because people view the ad. There’s the media, PR, and all of people who are talking about the ads, so it gets other people curious to go online and watch.”

Then comes another key ingredient: social pressure.

“The idea is that I need to see the ads that are better, and I need to share it with the people faster, before anybody else does,” Teixeira says. “Many people doing this whole process? That’s how you get a viral ad.”

So getting allies throughout the process matters.

“What I find, which the companies I’ve spoken with have confirmed, is that most of their views come from a small portion of the people who interact with the ads.”

Really?

“It’s like this,” Teixeira explains. “I sent an ad to 10 people. Half of them are going to view it; half of them are going to not watch it. Out of those, three people are just going to watch it and not share it. One person might share it with one or two people. And then one person might share it with 10 or 15 people. So you need to get that latter person.”

“And one way that companies have been trying to get this person is by finding people who have a huge audience online. You could use famous personalities, but who you really want to use are people who have a huge influence on others, especially young people who are likely to share viral ads.”

He also notes that some people are paid or given perks – even just to comment on an ad, be it positive or negative. “That’s enough to generate curiosity.”

But does having a wildly funny/scary/sexually explicit Super Bowl ad actually help you sell your product?

“This is where the pitfall lies, when companies start to focus too much on the content, too much on promotion, too much on getting people to share, too much on viral,” Teixeira says. “An ad can become hugely successful, but it just entertains lots of people. It didn’t reach the intended target audience and it doesn’t impact the people in that target audience. So, it doesn’t create impact by increasing sales or changing attitudes about the brand.”

Teixeira has found that what makes people more likely to view an ad can actually make it less likely that they’ll share it and less likely that people will buy the product being pitched. “For example, I’ve done research on shocking humor and non-shocking humor. If you use shocking humor, people are more likely to view the ad until the end. But they’re less likely to share it relative to using non-shocking humor.”

If you don’t manage a balance, you can succeed — but maybe not in the way that matters to your bottom line.

So what’s the magic formula?

“There’s no one answer that solves all your problems: viewing, sharing, and purchase,” Teixeira says. “That’s where the balance and fine-tuning and doing a lot of pre-testing, post-testing, and all of these evaluations with the ad agency come in.”

So with all of this teasing and crowdsourcing and, in some cases, an outright reveal of a campaign,

Is the Super Bowl ad “reveal” dead?

Prompted by this article in Ad Age, I asked Jonah Sachs to help me tease this one out. It turns out that, while the industry itself may be lamenting the change in stand-alone storytelling, it might not matter so much for viewers.

“For the vast majority of people, it’s still a reveal,” he says. ” It’s still a little bit like going to a movie where you’ve seen the previews instead of just going in cold. But I think that anticipation is built when people have a sense of what their favorite ads are. They haven’t seen [a number of them]. And now there’s a question of, what’s going to happen?”

“Which is very much like watching a sporting event, anyway.”

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For more on the anatomy of Super Bowl ads, check out this series of charts on the last 10 years of commercials. One interesting note? The number of unique car brands featured has increased from 3 to 12 since 2003. And keep an eye out for our month-long Insight Center on the future of advertising, which kicks off on Feb. 12.

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.