Super Bowl Sunday.
Coincidentally falling on my birthday this year. As a Bills fan, this day is especially difficult. But, I love the game too much to not watch just because my team’s out of it this year.
I spend the day doing what I always do: Watching eight hours of hype leading up to three hours of hopefully thrilling football, punctuated by the occasional LOL! TV commercial moment.
Unlike any other major TV event in America, those commercials have become synonymous with the game for a long time. Trailers of commercials are now leaked to YouTube ahead or media hordes descending on teams.
Luckily, I've managed to go this past month with only seeing one of the ads that will run. I say luckily as I prefer to open presents Christmas morning, not Christmas Eve.
Good, bad or indifferent, there's something special about waiting.
The $3 million per :30 second extravaganza that wins clients and influences friends wasn’t always this much of a spectacle though.
The first Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Green Bay Packers cost advertisers an average of $40,000 per :30 second spot. (It was the only Super Bowl to run on two networks, CBS and NBC.)
The event is unique from an ad perspective in that at no other time during the year are commercials compared side by side like this. Agency-client relationships and the careers of many a creative team hang in the balance as flyover country decides their fate.
It’s funny too that the mantra you hear most in advertising is how content is king, and that your spot must kill.
Missing from that equation though is that the game of football itself is the real content driving things here. Some people may say they only watch the game for the commercials, but remember:
No Super Bowl—no Super Bowl ads.
Without it, no armchair quarterback discussions Monday morning. No YouTube views. No Twitter speculation. None of it.
An ad should never be more important than the content that it supports.
While I can recall some funny Super Bowl ads over the years, I will never forget “Wide Right!”
What beer ad can do that?
___________________________________About the author: Bill Green blogs on Make The Logo Bigger as well as on Twitter, and he also rants on AdVerve.
___________________________________About the author: Bill Green blogs on Make The Logo Bigger as well as on Twitter, and he also rants on AdVerve.
