The Super Bowl is the only television event of the year where you will hear more conversation during the game than at commercial break. The Super Bowl is so big it even appeals to the non-football fan, and for good reason, with pregame and halftime concerts by big-named stars (this year is Madonna) — and it is the biggest night of the year for commercial advertisers. Whether good or bad, these commercials generate a lot of buzz. The Super Bowl commercials, more than any others, are always examined closely, with 30-second spots costing advertisers $3.5 million this year.
When I think about the companies that advertise during the Super Bowl event, a few come to mind: Budweiser, Miller, Pepsi, Coke, McDonald’s and E-Trade. These are all Fortune 500 companies who risk millions of dollars every year during the Super Bowl to push their products. There have been several startup companies that have also advertised during the Super Bowl. For those companies who are not yet on stable ground, this can really make or break the bank. For instance, Just for Feet did a controversial advertisement during the 1999 Super Bowl, and later that year the company filed for bankruptcy.
A good advertisement, on the other hand, can lead to a lot of exposure. Remember the kid who imitated Darth Vader last year? The $3 million advertisement from Volkswagen was estimated by Yahoo! News to receive $100 million in publicity value after its Super Bowl debut. Since last year, the Volkswagen commercial has been viewed on YouTube over 49 million times, on top of the millions of impressions it made during the Super Bowl telecast.
Those two advertisements alone create enough evidence why many of us feel as though the commercials are a big part of the Super Bowl event. Below are some of the ads I consider to be the best and the worst of the past few decades.
The historically bad
Evil beavers love Miller Lite and yet somehow I was not aware of this fact until just now. Did you feel your IQ drop seven points as a result of this ad? Alright, well I will admit that I may have let out a chuckle during this ad, but mainly because I reverted back to my 10-year-old self. This however, really did nothing to tie in the product with the advertisement. The same can be said for a commercial that I’m sure PETA thoroughly enjoyed, with Outpost.com. Watching this ad was about as painful as (more…)
Third-party credibility: the keystone of any good PR effort. Your potential customers are always more interested to hear what their peers have to say about you than what you have to say about yourself. As an old colleague of mine used to say, every mother is going to call her son handsome, regardless of the facts of the matter. As such, PR departments for years have anchored much of their work around customer testimonials. Written case studies are often the most reliable tool PR people have at their disposal.
