$2.3 million for a 30-second Super Bowl TV Ad –This Year For That Kind of Money Advertisers Are Getting Sharp – Converging The Spend With Online Campaigns, Even Advertising In Print To Watch Their Ad

But then again, $2.3 million is a lot of money – a Super Bowl record – for TV commercial time. If a company is going to spend like that then it had better have as much positive pre-publicity as possible so people actually watch the ad, that it be so good that white and blue collar workers talk about it during the Monday- after coffee breaks, and that there is an Internet campaign in full swing to take advantage of that fleeting 30 seconds of glory.

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“The Advertiser-Dependent Television Model Can Not Survive. Those Broadcasters Who Cannot Resolve This Will Die” – Unilever Global Media Director
When the vice-president of global media for Unilever, one of the world’s largest television advertisers, tells the television industry it needs to change its ways or “die”, then the industry had better pay close attention.

Food Ads Under Attack Again: New Survey Says Kids Think “Fat-Free” and “Diet” Are Synonymous with “Nutritious”
As the food industry globally works on self-regulations in advertising various fatty or salty foods to the under 12s, a new survey has come along suggesting certain buzz words like “fat-free” and “diet” need to be fully explained, or not used, since kids equate those words with healthy foods.

When Procter & Gamble, the Worlds Largest Advertiser, Dramatically Cuts TV Spot Buys And Puts the Money Into More Product Placement Then You Know the Television Advertising Revolution Is Underway. Goodbye to the 30-Second Ad?
Procter & Gamble (P&G) has just moved the earth under Madison Avenue, and the television advertising executives, who knew doom was impending but perhaps not this soon, are still in shock. Television product placement has become so important for P&G that it has cut way back on its upfront TV ad buying for next season, putting the money instead into increasing its already very successful product placement campaigns.

The One Second Ad Campaign
Antwerp agency defies all logic, again, and tells you all you need to know about advertising in one second.

Some Good Has Finally Come From Seeing Janet Jackson’s Nipple: We Don’t Get to See Mickey Rooney’s Posterior
The idea was that Airborne, a cold remedy, would spend $1.15 million on a 15-second ad during the 2005 Super Bowl in which old-time Hollywood star Mickey Rooney sits in a sauna, he hears a cough, and as he rushes out he drops his towel and we see…. well, we see what we really don’t want to see of a 84-year-old man.

Junk Food Joins Alcohol and Tobacco as TV Advertising No-Go Areas
The reason we and our kids are fat is because we succumb to all that junk food advertising on television instead of eating healthy nutritional salads, vegetables and the like. Actually, it’s not our fault as parents; it’s the kids fault since they are the ones who after watching all those television ads directed at them are dragging us to those fast-food outlets

The Super Bowl, America’s football championship, draws most of America’s families, an audience of around 90 million, particularly males of all ages. It is an advertiser’s dream come true, with a matching price tag, for that prized male audience. It may be the only television program where people actually want to watch the ads because they are so pre-hyped beforehand and because everyone knows those ads are the very finest the advertising community believes it can create. It has become an American institution to watch Super Bowl ads and rate which were the best.

But strangely, for all the money spent on the ads there has been limited convergence in the past with matching online campaigns. Last year, for instance, Reprise Media reported that advertisers in general saw a 600% increase in their web traffic within 24 hours of their Super Bowl ad, but some major companies like Visa credit cards and Pepsi did a poor job of drawing people onto the Internet. This year companies are trying to make sure they get the highest web traffic possible.

Perhaps the best example of planning a campaign around a single event comes from Burger King. The hamburger restaurant chain usually doesn’t get to advertise in the Super Bowl because McDonalds has owned that right, but this year with the Winter Olympics beginning just five days after the Super Bowl and McDonalds an official Olympics sponsor it has opted to concentrate its spend there and thus opened the Super Bowl door to Burger King.

And Burger King is doing things in a big way. It has opted for a 60 second ad at a reported $5 million. The ad, which in itself is said to have cost about $1 million to produce, is based in style on the old Hollywood musicals and features 92 “Whopperettes” dressed as hamburgers, pickles, lettuce – you get the idea – singing new lyrics to “Have it Your Way”.

But Burger King is making sure you remember the Whopperettes. It has struck a deal with Sprint that its wireless phone video subscribers can, within 30 minutes of the ad airing, have it sent to their cell phone in a longer version including scenes that were cut and showing shots of what took place behind the scenes.

That same Super Sunday on the Burger King web site a special interactive Whopperette section opens up and the ad can be downloaded onto iPods. Whopperette posters will be displayed in its 7,600 restaurants and the campaign will also extend to movie theaters. There’ll also be two more Whopperette ads.

“As much as people want to write the TV network obituaries, alternative media becomes a way of extending what is still the No.1 form of viewership in the world, Russ Klein, Burger King’s marketing director, told USA Today.

“Instead of having the ad stand alone, they are surrounding it with other platforms where people are migrating. You want to get the biggest bang for your buck by putting the commercial in other venues,” Andy Donchin, director of national broadcast for Carat, told the newspaper.

But Burger King did not wait until Super Sunday to start its campaign. A month before the Super Bowl it began an online interactive game called Subservient Chicken which ends just a few days before the game day – the big winners get a trip to Detroit to see the Super Bowl. Also new TV ads with a football theme were launched.

But not every company can afford the type of money Burger King is putting into its campaign.

Emerald of California nuts has bought a 30-second ad. How to separate itself from the clutter? It is buying ads in USA Today and The New York Times to promote its TV ad. Do Super Bowl ads work? The company showed its first Super Bowl ad last year and reported a 56% sales growth in the four weeks immediately after the Super Bowl.

Ads with animals have proved particularly positive over the years, and sexual connotations did OK with the male viewers until Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show in which she exposed a breast. Since then sex has been frowned upon for such a family show.

But that doesn’t stop sponsors like GoDaddy.com, the Internet domain registration company, from pushing the envelope. Last year it paid to show a very sexy ad and after its first run during the game’s first half the Fox network decided to drop its repeat showing paid for in the second half. So this year GoDaddy has prepared five more sexy ads all of which ABC, this year’s network provider, has turned down. Naturally every time an ad is refused the hype gets larger, and GoDaddy has probably done as well in name recognition before the game as it could hope, and probably doesn’t care if it gets to show its ad or not.

Back to Burger King. No doubt McDonalds will be watching that campaign like hawks. But McDonald’s own blanket ad coverage begins just five days later from the Winter Olympics and its most expensive 30 second ad in prime time will cost about 30% of what it would have cost during the Super Bowl.

And McDonalds is not holding back on its Olympics campaign. It is launching Olympic-themed TV commercials featuring Ronald McDonald and also a spot celebrating Olympic dreams, it will draw big publicity that its restaurants in the Olympic Village and the Press Center will debut McCafe and the Games will serve as McDonald’s global introduction of its nutrition information initiative that tells customers the nutritional value of the food they are buying.

Two very different campaigns by competing hamburger restaurants – one built on one TV ad in America’s biggest TV show, and expanding to various forms of media, and the other based on blanket TV ads within the Olympics arena plus corporate initiatives.

When all the smoke clears it should be an interesting study to see how each succeeds.

Whopperettes Flop - February 12, 2006

It just goes to show – it’s not how much money you spend on producing and screening an ad for the most watched annual sporting event in America, what you really have to do is make people laugh. And for whatever the Whopperettes might have done, they didn’t make people laugh.

Since the Super Bowl there has been innumerable surveys done on which ads people remembered the best. For $2.3 for a 30-scond ad, some $5 million for 60 seconds, you certainly want people talking about what you did the next day.

Right up there is the Federal Express ad that ends with a dinosaur stepping on a caveman (you have to see it and then you’ll laugh!); there are ads with chimpanzees, there was an ad where a mobile phone user throws it in the face of his companion to show one that one of its features is protection, and all of this people talked about. But nowhere in any of these surveys do people talk about the 92 Whopperettes doing their thing.

Hollywood stopped making musicals years ago. But they churn out the comedies. Maybe they understood a thing or two that Burger King executives didn’t.