With Super Bowl ad rates averaging $4 million per 30 seconds, total spending for commercials during this year’s game approached $300 million.
Here’s the problem: most of those commercials have already been forgotten. Based on exclusive research done for Bloomberg Businessweek by marketing research firm db5, a survey of audience respondents suggest they only remembered less than 10% of Sunday’s commercials.
Despite what some so-called expert panels say about why certain ads are more successful than others, it’s likely those results are too biased or subjective to tell us which ads were truly memorable. db5 surveyed 504 people who watched the game in its entirety, and the results are surprising.
Poor Recollection
When asked to recall as many companies as possible that had ads in the big game, the average response was only 5.4 names long. With more than 50 companies buying ads, that means less than 10% were recalled. The top winners were Budweiser, Doritos, Coke, Pepsi, and GoDaddy—the only brands with viewer recall rates of over 25%. Just twelve companies saw more than 10% recollection rates. That vast majority saw under 10% recall.
Even when viewers were given a sample list of advertisers, and asked whether they remember seeing an ad for each company, only 49% of those ads were remembered on average.
Daniel Goldstein, db5′s Chief Strategy Officer, is a former ad executive, who has worked on several major Super Bowl campaigns (Pepsi, Doritos, Visa). He says everybody is trying to copy the 1984 Apple one-hit wonder approach. “Apple was the first to prove you could air a commercial only one time, during the Super Bowl, and have it bring you a ton of followup attention, praise, and sales,” he says.
Since then, that phenomenon has created a monster. Talking animals, talking babies, talking animal babies, big celebrities, bikinis, big-name Hollywood directors—the list of gimmicks is endless. Goldstein says, “the ad inventory is much bigger than human brain capacity.” Most of the audience can’t keep up with all the tricks, and almost all the ads are quickly forgotten.
Let’s look at some trends that could have made a difference:
Consistency
The most-remembered commercials came from companies who consistently buy Super Bowl ads on an annual basis such as Budweiser, Doritos, Coke, Pepsi, and GoDaddy. Despite USA Today claiming that GoDaddy’s ad was a loser, the audience data tells us it was in fact well-remembered by viewers. (TiVo also said GoDaddy had one of the four most-watched ads the entire game).
Teasers
One theory is that ads can be better remembered with advanced viewings, because they would give audiences more chances to see and process the spot. According to the data, however, that did not turn out to be the case. Ads that were seen for the first time did just as well as previously-viewed ads.
Similarly, ads that were seen online in advance did not affect audience recall:
Experts
The famous USA Today poll ranking the best ads does have a real effect in the industry. “Heads roll based on this report. Agencies and creatives feel significant heat if their ad does not perform well,” says Goldstein. He still is amazed that companies would make such personnel decisions based on a real-time assessment of how funny the ad seems in a single moment. There is little patience for evaluation on how the ad performs a few days later, if it was remembered, and if it generated positive sales. According to the data, audience recall of the ads had almost no relationship to the newspaper’s annual scoreboard. With the exception of two obviously well-done outliers (Budweiser and Doritos), the scores tell us little.
A Never-Ending Question
The mathematical question for companies: is 10% recall among 100 million people worth $4 million? With the increase of media fragmentation, there are only so few opportunities to reach many viewers at once. Goldstein says that this is not a knock against the Super Bowl being a bad platform for advertisers, but rather that advertisers should not waste such a big opportunity they paid big bucks for. The one trend that does seem to work is consistently showing up year after year, making the money a worthwhile investment in the long run. If companies want to go big, they should be going big every year.
