Did you know the cost of a 30-second spot on this year’s Super Bowl was $3 million (Source:Reuters)? This got me thinking…For the cost of this one, 30-second spot, what are the results a brand could have seen investing $3 million in a Word of Mouth marketing program?
According to Forrester Research Inc, Word of Mouth impressions on the social web are about ¼ impressions of paid media. (This doesn’t include offline WOM impressions.) Super Bowl ads have massive reach. 7 out of 10 people watching TV on Sunday were tuned into the Super Bowl. And a really great Super Bowl ad like Apple’s 1984 ad creates a ton of positive WOM and can be a defining moment for the brand. But nothing beats WOM when it comes to trust and real influence.
So, which marketing decision do you think has more “lifetime marketing value?” A 30-second spot on the Superbowl or energizing your Brand Advocates for 20 years?
Rob Fuggetta
As Founder and CEO of Zuberance, Rob Fuggetta is the driving force behind Zuberance’s vision and strategy.
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Loved this post Rob. Greg and I were watching the game and thought the commercials were pretty flat. One thing that I remarked about was how ‘unsocial’ they were. There was one, for example, that advertised a floral service (see I can’t even recall the brand) and in the moment I said to Greg – how ‘dumb’ that they aren’t linking to facebook with a promotion of x dollars off for someone’s first order or somehow taking people back to their site in some promotional way that begins to build loyalty—your comments above are another flavor of that—not linking people to fans. There’s a lot of runway in the social marketing area and ways to improve. Glad you continue to be at the forefront of the trends. Thanks for being in touch. Hope this finds you well. Anthea
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The Super Bowl ad has become the perfect example of reckless, out of control advertising spend. $3 million dollars is just the media spend. Factor in agency costs, staff resource costs, spokesperson costs, production costs, and more and you are looking at $4 million and higher for this effort.
It has become a “private club” of sorts. For the large, established players such as Budweiser, Pepsi, Coke it says, “Hey, we are still on the A-list of companies”. For the up and comers like Groupon, Chatter.com and Sketchers, it says, “Hey, look at us, we’ve made it to the A-list”.
Groupon managed to accomplish the unthinkable, spend millions of dollars and lose customers. Drunk from their hundreds of millions of venture capital and deal of the day success, they hire over hyped and overrated Crispin Porter, pay Timothy Hutton as a spokesperson, spend more on Christopher Guest (of mockumentary fame) to direct this “witty” spoof on Tibet only to completely turn off millions of viewers and mostly likely millions of current and future customers who interpreted the ad as tasteless and insensitive.
Yes, these ads become part of our culture. Yes, they create water cooler conversations and a few YouTube sensations. Yes, they create new customers for many of the advertisers.
However, they do not create a long term, valuable relationship with your best, most vocal, loyal customers. They don’t continue to give back over time like building a strong base of customer advocates who not only do the best advertising for your brand but create an unbiased, trustworthy barometer driving customer acquisition, new product launches, guerrilla marketing campaigns, customer service and strategic crisis management if needed. All of this for much less than $3 million.
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