Superbowl-ads.com Article Archive

Advertisers await results of the analyses, polls and surveys of consumer responses to the commercials, usually there are conflicting results. SuperBowl-Ads.com will release our “Top 5 Ads of 2013″ video in the next few days, as we have done for the past 15 years.

Stewart Elliot has compiled some of the information and data released on Monday and Tuesday, after the conclusion of Super Bowl XLVII. Read his article for more information.

AddThis, a data company, tracks what is called “brand lift”, said “The sponsor that enjoyed the largest brand lift, up 634 percent, was Anheuser-Busch. Go Daddy was second.”

Coca-Cola, said the total number of fan engagements with the “CokeChase” campaign – on the special Web site and YouTube – exceeded 11 million. (more than projected)

Dachis Group, said the Budweiser commercial about the Clydesdale won in “content virality”, with 310,000 “likes” and shares in social media, about double the second-place finisher.

Kantar Media, said the highest-rated commercial was not from a marketer but from CBS, promoting the CBS series “Person of Interest,” at the 2 minute warning break in the fourth quarter.

Frank N. Magid Associates, said the top commercial in the game, was the Budweiser spot.

TiVo, said that a commercial for Taco Bell was the “most engaging” of the game.

Visible Measures, said the most-watched commercial of Super Bowl XLVII was a spot for the Toyota RAV4, but that may change because

In other polls:

YouTube’s Ad Blitz wont release their winner for another 5 days so you can still vote on your favorites. VOTE NOW

USA Today’s Ad Meter declared Budweiser’s Clydesdale “Brotherhood” ad the winner after the game and based it or consumers rating the ads during the game. See their results in order of scoring.

Brandbowl announced their winner was Volkswagen’s “Get Happy”, their poll uses data from twitter and compiles a overall score.

SuperBowl-Ads.com, We are declaring Dodge Ram Trucks “Farmers” ad the most “reviewed” ad right after the game was over. Go Daddy’s ad “Perfect Match” was the most shared from our site Friday and Saturday before the game. Our “Top 5 ads of 2013″ will be released soon. Check out our winners from the past 15 years.

Read More at : NYTimes

Let’s be honest: A good deal of people will tune in to the game just for the Super Bowl 2013 ads.

These people may not be the biggest football fans, or maybe their team is not in the game. Regardless, all they want to see is the funniest commercials.

These folks will probably be busy eating and socializing during the early parts of the game—the focus will be on the chips and wings instead of the intricacies of the read-option.

Companies will need to realize this. No one remembers ads from the first minute of the first quarter. No one remembers ads that come out a week before. They remember them in the heat of the game, from the second half on.

If a company reveals an ad too early, then it loses a lot of effectiveness.

With so many companies leaking out ads well ahead of its scheduled air time, it loses some of its luster and the audience will look away.

The best part about an ad on Super Bowl Sunday is to get the extra eyeballs on a brand and to hope that those eyeballs turn into customers. But you can’t get new customers if no one’s paying attention. So companies need to place the ad at a time when everyone is watching.

Putting an ad out two weeks before the game starts means that it’s just another ad, not one that comes with the glitz of being on Super Bowl Sunday.

Placing an ad anytime after the second half is smart—the eating has stopped, people have stopped socializing, no one has seen it beforehand, and the focus is squarely on the game.

If a company places an ad too early—say, the middle of the first quarter, or worse, a few days before—it runs the risk of too many people in the bathroom, or in the kitchen or on their smart phones.

Of course, it’s more expensive to place an ad later in the game. But the pay-off is completely worth it.

The best ads will catch everyone by surprise. If they’re released ahead of time, no one will be talking about them at the water cooler.

Read More at : Bleacher Report

A 3-year-old company uses technology from MIT’s Media Lab and applies it to ad testing. Try it out yourself with your webcam right here.

Welcome to the future of advertising, where the wisdom of spending a reported $4 million for a 30-second spot in the Super Bowl doesn’t have to be left to the imagination of an ad agency’s creative team and the honesty of focus groups.

When you turn on the the Super Bowl tomorrow and watch that game within the game — the ads — there’s a good chance that at least several of those pieces have been tested using Affectiva’s tools, which are being used by both Coca-Cola and Unilever, which owns brands ranging from Dove soap to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

Using a Web camera and with a user’s permission (usually commissioned by an ad agency or research firm), Affectiva monitors a person’s expressions while watching an ad.

Affectiva provides a topline measurement on a scale from 1 to 10 on something the company calls an Affdex score. That’s a combination of involvement, a “feel good” index, and a “minus metric.” Behind that, reaction over the length of the ad is monitored and charted. When did someone smile during the ad? When did they frown? When did they drift? It’s all tracked and produced on tables.

Affectiva was founded in 2009 and is based on technology created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. The technology was originally intended to work with people who have autism. Because people with autism may have difficulty displaying emotional reactions, co-founders Rana el Kaliouby and Rosalind Picard created a mathematical model for monitoring hard-to-perceive changes in their expressions.

“I personally think it could be a standard for advertising,” said Stephanie Tilenius, an executive-in-residence at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Kleiner was part of a $12 million Series C funding round announced in August. The company was also a big attention-grabber at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

If you have a Webcam on your computer, you can run through the Affectiva demonstration yourself right here. You can also test a goat-related ad from Doritos (really, it kind of works), a Hyundai ad with a “don’t tell mom” theme, and an already somewhat controversial ad from Volkswagen in which lots of people whom you wouldn’t expect to have Jamaican accents sound a lot like Jimmy Cliff.

Read more at : CNET

Super Bowl ads on TV have immense reach and cost big money. Last year’s Super Bowl XLVI attracted 111.3 million viewers, making it the most watched U.S. telecast of all time. This level of exposure doesn’t come cheap, however, as advertisers spent an average of $3.4 million for a 30-second spot, up more than $300,000 from 2011, according to Nielsen. Ads that aired during last year’s Super Bowl were also 34 percent more memorable and 42 percent better-liked than commercials that aired just a month earlier (January 2012).

Top Categories: Manufacturers Come Out Swinging
Many of this year’s big ad spenders were well-known names from familiar categories. Automotive, beer, motion pictures and soft drinks held their positions among the top-five categories, while the uptick in manufacturing spend for Super Bowl XLVI nudged out tortilla chips.

Auto made an aggressive comeback in 2011 and continued to blaze a trail as an ad spending leader during Super Bowl XLVI. After spending more than twice than the motion picture category in 2011, the auto category outspent beer by nearly three-fold in 2012—landing the top spot, by spending $90.5 million. Beer, led by Budweiser and Bud Light, came in a distant second place by spending $31.5 million. With big spenders–like Dodge (Ram), Acura, Audi, Chevy, Fiat–and several others that made the list of top 20 advertisers last year, auto shows no signs of slowing down.

Harnessing the power of social media makes perfect business sense. When an advertiser shells out between $3.5 million and $4.5 million for a Super Bowl ad, using social media to get added exposure isn’t just an afterthought. It helps amortize the cost of the commercial by generating millions of dollars in free publicity.

Audi of America, which is making its sixth-consecutive appearance in the event, believes chatter about Super Bowl ads begins to fade between 24 and 48 hours after the game is over, said Loren Angelo, general manager-brand marketing for the automaker. Unveiling the ads in the weeks before kickoff gives an advertiser the abiltity to have “a much longer conversation” with consumers, he said.

“The value is certainly in the anticipation of the Super Bowl,” Mr. Angelo added. “There’s only so much that people are going to talk about at the water cooler on Monday morning.”

The technique threatens to put a favorite Super Bowl ad trick on the shelf to collect dust. For decades, Super Bowl ads hinged on “the reveal” or the delivery of something surprising. While this new era of ads is generating loads of digital and social response, they are also removing a lot of the shock and wonder that were once a big part of the experience. Would Apple’s famous “1984″ ad from Super Bowl XVIII have had as much impact if it were shared endlessly online in the weeks leading up to its official TV debut?

Some critics think the old ideas are more sound. “Last year’s Super Bowl really calls the strategy of pre-release into question,” said Charles R. Taylor, a marketing professor at Villanova Business School. With so many companies running visual teasers of their spots, he said, many advertisers lost “the element of surprise” and its absence “may have dampened the effectiveness of some pretty good ads that would have made a splash if not previewed.”

Read More at : AdAge

Not all TV programs are right for all brands –even if it happens to be the Super Bowl. But the 10th annual Super Bowl Engagement Survey– conducted by Brand Keys, Inc., a New York-based brand and customer loyalty research consultancy – reports that when it comes to winning, only half of Super Bowl XLIV’s advertisers will get real returns on their sizeable investments.

“The Super Bowl has long been a showcase of ‘creative’ advertising and ‘buy big’ audiences. But ultimately all TV spots are judged by how well they perform off the field. Do they engage customers, drive positive behavior, sales, and build the brand?” asked Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys’ president. “Awareness is the price-of-entry to this arena. No Super Bowl advertiser is in this to increase awareness. Everybody already knows them. So if awareness isn’t the goal, brand engagement must be the ultimate measure of an advertising touchdown.”

This year’s Brand Keys Super Bowl Engagement Survey was conducted January 14th and 15th, three weeks before the February 5th game, polling a national sample of 1,500 men and women, 18 to 65 years of age, who indicated that they are going to watch Super Bowl XLVI. The research examined the brands reported in industry publications as Super Bowl advertisers and determined to what degree brand values were affected by the Super Bowl venue. Advertisers are classified as “winners” (+5 brand equity points), “losers” (-5 or more brand equity points), or “tied” (brand values were left unaffected by the Super Bowl setting), with results as follows:

Winners

Doritos (+13)
Hyundai (+12)
Cars.com (+10)
Audi (+9)
Coke (+8)
Pepsi (+7)
GoDaddy.com (+6)
M&Ms (+6)
CareerBuilder (+5)
Skechers (+5)
Toyota (+5)

Losers

Kia (-5)
Teleflora (-6)
Dannon (-6)
Best Buy (-7)
Century 21 (-8)
Budweiser (-9)

Ties

Chrysler (-0-)
Volkswagen (-0-)
GM (-0-)
NBC ‘The Voice’ (-0-)
Bud Light Platinum (-0-)
Honda (-0-)

The Super Bowl Engagement Survey, like the Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index predictively measures respondents’ true reactions to brands with the context of the medium. Results correlate highly with consumer behavior, and have been validated as reliable predictors of future brand purchase.

The final score: brand engagement is vastly different from being watched, being entertained, or being talked about. “A laugh, a sigh, or a tweet aren’t really acceptable returns on an investment this size,” noted Passikoff. “At a time when everyone is being pressed for greater strategic and monetary accountability, being able to judge that before you sign the check is the real definition of a winner.”

Contact Brand Keys
Robert Passikoff
Email: Robertp@BradKeys.com
212 532 – 6028 x13

As creatives and media decision makers prepare to premiere expensive new commercials for 1Q 2012′s big television events, the Super Bowl(TM), The Grammys(TM) and The Academy Awards(TM), a new research study is demonstrating how their across-the-board impact can be dramatically improved with a flight of cinema advertising. The findings come from a quantitative study from Lieberman Research, commissioned by Screenvision, a leading innovator in cinema advertising and alternative content programming.

The Screenvision/Lieberman Research study looked at two different groups exposed to the same Big Event TV ad, on television and in-cinema. An online survey was conducted in the 24-48 hours after the airing of the commercial during Super Bowl XLV(TM) in February 2011, with a nationally representative group of 1,001 adults, age 18+. A second, in-depth interviewer-administered survey was conducted with 297 respondents at theaters in the Los Angeles and Nashville DMAs which screened these same ads, in the weekend following Super Bowl XLV.

The results? The combination of a Big TV Event ad buy with cinema advertising delivered double-digit increases in ROI deemed metrics among the moviegoers who recalled the ads in both venues:

Brand Affinity, i.e. the overall opinion of the brand, +41%
Brand Awareness, +27%
Word-of-Mouth, i.e., likelihood of sharing positive opinions, +27%
Brand Recommendation, +13%

The study also demonstrated the unique power of showcasing showpiece Big Event TV commercials on theater screens:

The recall of respondents who were exposed to spots only in theaters was 12% higher than those who had only viewed the spots on TV

Cinema-only run out performed Big Event TV-only across the board -
+14% in Ad Likeability
+ 21% in Ad Persuasiveness
+6% in Brand Consideration
+4% in Brand Opinion
77% of respondents thought Super Bowl and other Big Event TV ads were a good fit for cinema

Moviegoers enjoyed the Super Bowl ads more in the cinema environment, by a margin of 17:1

“This study clearly demonstrates the unique power of cinema advertising and the role it plays in driving awareness, affinity, positive word of mouth and purchasing intent,” said Mark Mitchell, Chief Revenue Officer of Screenvision. “It also dramatically reinforces the benefits that cinema delivers to amplify a Super Bowl, Grammys, Academy Awards and other Big Event TV investment.”

Read More at: DailyFinance

Not too long ago, companies buying ad time during the Super Bowl — TV’s most expensive commercial venue — sought to keep their game-day commercials secret until air time. The theory was to wow TV audiences with the element of surprise: a funny punch line, a new spokesperson or a catchy song delivered fresh. The goal was to guarantee that the ads would be the subject of office break-room conversation the next day.

But an increasing number of Super Bowl advertisers are now using a strategy that was once anathema: posting their game-day commercials online, well in advance of the game. Their goal: to get consumers talking about their ads not only after the Super Bowl, but sometimes months before kick-off.

That strategy, however, also begs the question of whether consumers actually watch those ads during the game, or do the commercials become just another opportunity to get a fresh beer from the fridge.

“Over time, the stakes have escalated,” says Jon Swallen, Kantar’s senior vice president of research. “One way advertisers try to monetize that is with these pre-game, pre-release ads, trying to raise buzz and awareness. It helps to try to cut through the clutter.”

Increasingly, the name of the marketing game is to tease viewers ahead of game day — with clips or even the entire commercial. While some potential Super Bowl ads are already online, such as those from Pepsi MAX and Doritos, other marketers are still deciding whether to post their commercials early.

Go Daddy, for one, says it’s likely to pre-release one of its two Super Bowl ads before the game, while a second commercial — announcing a new celebrity spokesperson — will be kept under wraps.

Some marketers argue that game-day ratings for a specific commercial may be beside the point. “The biggest thing for us, at least at Pepsico, is about engaging our fans for the prior eight months,” says Rudy Wilson, vice president of marketing at Frito-Lay, a unit of Pepsico (PEP). Wilson pioneered the company’s five-year-old “Crash the Super Bowl” program, which began soliciting consumer-created ads for the upcoming Super Bowl last fall. Of the 10 finalist videos posted on the site, six will air during this year’s game.

Wilson acknowledges that pre-releasing ads may not give them any edge when it comes to their broadcast performance. But the benefit of engaging consumers months in advance makes the contest worth it. “It allows for our success not to be dictated by 30 seconds,” he says.

Pre-Bowl Ad Buzz

The weeks leading up the game are “a unique period in time when audiences around the world are focused on your brand,” says Audi chief marketing officer Scott Keogh, via email. “The lead-up to the Super Bowl can be just as important as game day.”

This year, Audi debuted what it calls a “prelude” to its Super Bowl spot: a minute-long ad based on the children’s book Goodnight Moon. Both the Goodnight ad and the Super Bowl spot feature Audi’s A8 sedan.

By pre-releasing Super Bowl ads, marketers are also able to bring in consumers via social-networking such as Facebook or Twitter. Audi’s social-media campaign last year helped generate 3.1 million Facebook impressions and 3.1 million YouTube views, according to Keogh. And this year, Audi plans to host sponsored messages on Twitter leading up to the game — and to “take over” YouTube’s home page on Super Bowl Sunday, Keogh writes.

Are ads superior to game?

Peter Hartlaub

“The Super Bowl ads are better than the game.”

No doubt you’ve heard at least one friend or relative make that statement, usually after a few drinks, a large gambling loss or a horrible set of Super Bowl events that mock the sports gods — such as Washington quarterback Mark Rypien being named MVP.

But have we really reached the point where commercials have become more entertaining than the sporting event that surrounds them?

Football purists will say they hate the ads, but they still seem to talk about them as much as the game itself. A good Super Bowl might get lost in your memory, but a good Super Bowl ad will be embedded in your brain for years to come. Chances are you remember every line and camera angle from Coke’s famous “Mean Joe Greene” commercial from 1979. But can you name the two teams that played the same year?

The rise in publicity for Super Bowl ads, big halftime shows and other off-field stunts are no accident. Although the Nielsen ratings for the Super Bowl have fallen over the decades, the game-watching demographic has widened to include more women and men who don’t like the sport.

“Originally it was just a football game, and guys who liked football were the ones who watched it,” says Don Bruzzone of Alameda’s Bruzzone Research Co., which has been measuring the effectiveness of Super Bowl commercials since 1992. “And then all of a sudden it grew into an extravaganza that would appeal to almost everybody.”

Super Bowl advertisements will cost about $2.6 million for a 30-second spot this year. (They cost a “mere” $324,000 when the San Francisco 49ers beat the Cincinnati Bengals in 1982.)

Bruzzone’s Paul Shellenberg says in terms of who’s advertising, 2007 is looking a lot like 2006 — with regulars such as Budweiser and Pepsi returning with several spots. As of Monday afternoon, there were fewer movie spots scheduled than usual, although Shellenberg said the studios often wait until the last minute.

The ads are a huge gamble for advertisers. Bruzzone’s research shows that a successful commercial gives a buyer eight times the impact of an ad that doesn’t resonate.

The price for an ad has become a punch line, which has even been used in the commercials themselves. When all the figures are added up, though, Bruzzone says research shows that advertisers aren’t throwing away their money.

“There are a lot of intelligent people making decisions about this sort of thing,” Bruzzone says. “They’re priced at just about what they’re worth.”

Bruzzone doesn’t keep track of which are “good years” and “bad years” for Super Bowl advertisers. Fortunately, we do. What surrounds this article is a sincere and enthusiastic — while not especially objective — attempt to determine whether the ads are, in fact, more entertaining than the game.

My methodology was simple, if not scientific: I’ve already watched every game for the past 10 years, and I spent several afternoons last week watching Super Bowl ads archived on YouTube and the very helpful Superbowl-ads.com Web site.

You can decide whether it’s worth your time to add up my winners and losers to find out who’s ahead — but I will reveal that it’s close. Look for a Monday morning SFGate.com Culture Blog entry that determines whether Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials were better than the game.

SUPER BOWL GAMES VS. COMMERCIALS

XXXI (1997)

The game: Green Bay 35, New England 21

The ads: Fred Astaire dances with a Dirt Devil vacuum and Holiday Inn promotes their renovations by joking about a guy who has undergone a sex change.

Final score: Neither side wanted to win. The game was predictably one-sided — Brett Favre (left) and the Packers were favored by 14 points and won by 14 points — but the ads were worse, including a digitally enhanced Astaire corpse and Holiday Inn’s big “screw you” to the gay, lesbian and transgender community. Football 9, commercials 2

The ads: Louie the Lizard tries killing off the Budweiser frogs, while a guy eating a lot of Tabasco spells doom for a mosquito that tries to suck his blood.

Final score: Terrell Davis running over the heavily favored Packers was cool, as was the sight of John Elway receiving his first Super Bowl ring. But it’s hard to beat an exploding bug. Commercials 31, football 24

The ads: The Monster.com “When I Grow Up” ads spoof corporate culture, Budweiser has a firehouse dalmatian puppy spot and Victoria’s Secret’s sexy ad proves that horny men are still the primary Super Bowl demographic.

Final score: Not sure what was more annoying — Just for Feet’s semi-racist ad that appeared to feature white guys tranquilizing a black runner from Kenya or the Atlanta Falcons’ stupid “dirty bird” dance. The ads gain the edge when Falcons safety Eugene Robinson gets arrested for solicitation of prostitution the night before the game. Commercials 14, football 10

The ads: E-Trade unveils its classic dancing monkey/”We just wasted 2 million bucks” commercial and EDS features its memorable spot about cat herders.

Final score: This is why TiVo was invented. The 2000 Super Bowl and commercial-fest were both so entertaining that there was literally no time to urinate. With arguably the most entertaining Super Bowl of all time and the best commercials falling on the same year, there can be no losers. Commercials 42, football 42 (tie)

The ads: Cedric the Entertainer shills for Budweiser, Bob Dole shills for Pepsi and EDS features the “running of the squirrels.”

Final score: Not a great year for commercials — does anyone even know what EDS sells? But the ads were still way better than this defense-oriented game, which featured the coma-inducing combination of Trent Dilfer and Kerry Collins as starting quarterbacks. Commercials 15, football 6

The ads: Charles Schwab features Barry Bonds, the Coen brothers direct an H&R Block commercial and several ads feature 9/11 tributes.

Final score: The post-9/11 commercials were classy, but became repetitive — and in retrospect, the Barry Bonds/Hank Aaron home run goof looks like something that should be turned over to the grand jury. The football game was a lot better, with Adam Vinatieri (above) kicking a last-minute field goal to seal the win. Football 28, commercials 17

The ads: Reebok’s Terry Tate: Office Linebacker, the “Cast Away” movie spoof and a Clydesdale football instant replay commercial all generate big laughs.

Final score: The only thing uglier than Budweiser’s crude “Upside Down Clown” ad was the Raiders’ game plan, which gave up 34 unanswered points to former Oakland coach Jon Gruden’s Buccaneers. The refs almost had to invoke the mercy rule in this contest. Commercials 72, football 0

The ads: A Sierra Mist commercial featuring a bagpiper getting cold air blown up his kilt looks like a Jane Austen film next to Budweiser’s flatulent horse. The 78 other ads seem to be focused on erectile dysfunction.

Final score: Everything went right during the game — a great contest between the Panthers and Patriots — and everything went wrong between plays. Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” (above) highlighted the crude and unoriginal commercials, which led to audience outrage and FCC action. Football 41, commercials minus 212

The ads: Diddy arrives at the red carpet in a Pepsi truck, Budweiser introduces a trash-talking cockatiel, and Ameriquest has a couple of decent-but-forgettable mistaken-identity ads.

Final score: Even though we didn’t have to see Mickey Rooney’s bare bottom (it was banned by the fun police), this was definitely a rebuilding year for the ad industry. Meanwhile, Tom Brady, linebacker Mike Vrabel (left) and the Patriots held off the Eagles and Terrell Owens, who stopped acting crazy for a few hours and added some drama by playing hurt. Football 35, commercials 3

The ads: A caveman gets chided for not using FedEx (it hasn’t been invented yet), Jim Henson’s Muppets are everywhere and the “magic fridge” gets Budweiser back on track.

Final score: The Seahawks didn’t come to play and neither did many of the advertisers, but at least we got to see a prehistoric dude get stomped on by a brontosaurus. Commercials 10, football 9