Why the Super Bowl Scores for Advertisers

It's all about recall

Heavy pressure on advertising budgets and brand performance makes it crucial for companies to get the most out of their media spending.

Super Bowl advertising is an extremely expensive proposition-both from a production standpoint, as well as airtime costs. Advertisers pay about $2 million for a thirty-second spot and many ads are produced to run exclusively, or to debut, during the Super Bowl. Some advertisers bank their whole ad budget on this once-a-year event.

So, while most of the research and polling around Super Bowl advertising focused on which ads viewers liked or thought were well produced, we decided to dig a little deeper.

We wanted to examine whether Super Bowl ads work better than ads in other major football games and were more memorable to consumers. In short, are advertisers getting their money's worth?

What we did

Our research is about the Super Bowl as an advertising medium. So we conducted our research during four events this year: two major college bowl games, the AFC conference championship and the Super Bowl. We conducted interviews by Internet with 1,200 adult males, aged 21 to 60, after four of the biggest football games of the year and asked them: a variety of questions related to the game itself; how well they remembered the ads, and the names of the sponsoring companies.

We then compared the effectiveness of the ads around each game to determine whether the Super Bowl is a more-or-less effective venue than a college or professional championship game.

What we found

Our research-conducted 24 hours after Tampa Bay's decisive win over Oakland in Super Bowl XXXVII-showed that adult male television viewers who watched the game could recall many of the ads shown throughout the game.

The January 26, 2003 contest was a blowout, with little doubt about the outcome after the first half. But audience advertisement awareness was not affected by the lopsided contest. Super Bowl XXXVII far exceeded other football games tested, as a vehicle for memorable advertising.

We found that male television viewers were three times more likely to report having watched all the advertisements in a given quarter of the game (compared to men watching other championship games). They were also able to accurately describe up to four times as many advertisements.

Our results were based on interviews comparing advertisement recall among men watching the Super Bowl with advertisement recall among men who watched the AFC Conference title game or a college football bowl game (the Fiesta Bowl or the Rose Bowl).

Some 37% of the respondents said they had watched all of the ads aired in any given quarter of the Super Bowl, compared with just 4% for the Rose Bowl, 13% for the Fiesta Bowl, and 7% for the AFC Championship game.

The most "popular" ads were not necessarily the most effective, we found. For example, Reebok advertisements won critical and popular acclaim, but did not rank high on the list of ads male Super Bowl viewers recalled.

Neither did advance hype necessarily improve recall. Some 39% of viewers said they had heard something about a specific Super Bowl ad before the telecast. But this hype-exposed group was actually less likely than average to remember any advertisements.

More research highlights:

• 87% could remember the name of at least one of the advertisers in the Super Bowl, while only 33% could remember an advertiser from the Rose Bowl game, 53% from the Fiesta Bowl, and 54% from the AFC Championship game.
• The average viewer could remember 3.5 advertisers in the Super Bowl, compared to only about one advertiser for the college and AFC Championship games.
• 48% said they had watched all the ads during the Super Bowl halftime show. Only 14% watched all the ads during halftime of the Rose Bowl, 21% during the Fiesta Bowl, and 16% for the AFC Championship game.
• Budweiser and Pepsi fared best during the Super Bowl. 66% of the audience remembered advertising for Budweiser, and 44% remembered ads for Pepsi.

It is worth it!

Our conclusion? The Super Bowl is indeed a superb environment for advertising. The game not only delivers close to 100 million viewers, but attentive, hard-to-reach male viewers who report exceptional recall of the ads. The NFL has created a highly effective, once-a-year advertising opportunity.