Every year someone writes a think piece about how Super Bowl ads are a waste of money. $5 million for 30 seconds! In an age of targeted digital! When you could reach your exact audience for pennies per impression! Surely this outdated mass media play is dead!
Every year someone writes a think piece about how Super Bowl ads are a waste of money.
And every year I disagree, not because I'm nostalgic (I literally just wrote about that being a trap) but because the math has changed in Super Bowl ads' favor. As media fragments, the value of the remaining mass moments increases. When there are fewer and fewer times everyone is watching the same thing at the same time, each instance of shared attention becomes more precious.
The Super Bowl ad isn't about reach-per-dollar efficiency. It's about something that targeted digital cannot buy at any price: cultural participation. Being part of the conversation. Having your brand be a shared reference point for 100 million people simultaneously. That's not impressions. That's imprinting.
At Nemo we're working on a Super Bowl brief right now and the client keeps asking 'what's the ROI?' And the honest answer is: the ROI is that for one night, your brand exists in the cultural conversation at a level that no amount of programmatic spending could achieve. You can't A/B test your way to cultural relevance.
The brands that shouldn't buy Super Bowl ads: anyone whose message requires targeting or explanation. The brands that should: anyone trying to plant a flag in collective memory. The cost is the feature, not the bug. If everyone could afford it, it wouldn't work.
I wrote most of this at my favorite window table at Ovation, watching Portland do its thing.