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The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

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Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#41

Post by rkomorn »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #38

at least $233,000 per second.. I'm not familiar with American culture, but are the following true? 1. More than half Americans watch it. 2. People don't go to toilet during breaks/ad time. Otherwise it's just money flushed down the bowl..

Super Bowl ads, in particular, really are their own thing. People will even watch them later, discuss, share, etc.

There are some people who have more interest in the Super Bowl for the ads than the sport.

So I'd say it's not money flushed down the bowl.

Random fun fact: 20ish years ago, I used to work at a web hosting company that had superbowlads.com (iirc) as a customer. I'm not surprised it's no longer an actual site, though: I speculatively doubt NFL lawyers would've left it alone.

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#42

Post by wincy »

jcattle wrote: post #30
Dylan16807 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in blind tests most people can't tell the difference between coke and generic cola According to who? I think most colas taste fine but it's not hard to differentiate the ones I've had.

Have you done a blind test before? A group of friends and I have done a blind test of around 10 coke brands before. The only ones you could reasonably tell apart were Pepsi and some dubious organic cokes. But of all the ones that actually try to replicate the coca cola flavour it was just pure guesswork on our side.

I did a blind taste test of Starry, Sprite, and 7-Up the other day. My wife was amused when I nailed all three. As a recovering fat guy, I’m a bit of a soft drink connoisseur (diet soda now!).

Unfortunately then the question became “well, which do you prefer?” And my answer was “I have no idea”.

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#43

Post by alphawhisky »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #38

at least $233,000 per second.. I'm not familiar with American culture, but are the following true? 1. More than half Americans watch it. 2. People don't go to toilet during breaks/ad time. Otherwise it's just money flushed down the bowl..

More than half is a stretch, about half sounds more right.

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#44

Post by Dylan16807 »

jcattle wrote: post #30
Dylan16807 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in blind tests most people can't tell the difference between coke and generic cola According to who? I think most colas taste fine but it's not hard to differentiate the ones I've had.

Have you done a blind test before? A group of friends and I have done a blind test of around 10 coke brands before. The only ones you could reasonably tell apart were Pepsi and some dubious organic cokes. But of all the ones that actually try to replicate the coca cola flavour it was just pure guesswork on our side.

I've never had any that specifically tried to replicate another brand, no. That's naturally going to be harder than telling apart normal colas.

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#45

Post by Dylan16807 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #24
Dylan16807 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in blind tests most people can't tell the difference between coke and generic cola According to who? I think most colas taste fine but it's not hard to differentiate the ones I've had.

> According to who? According to researchers who actually ran blinded tests: https://daily.jstor.org/the-coca-cola-wars-can-anybody-reall... What's funny is kind of the reverse is also true: when people were given the exact same cola but one was labeled Coke and the other Pepsi, not only did they say they preferred Coke, but fMRI brain scans should more prefrontal cortex activation for the Coke as well: https://mediu…

That blinded test isn't about telling the difference though, it's knowing which is which, a significantly harder thing to do without practice. And I don't know how many of the participants regularly drink any of the brands, which makes identification even harder.

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#46

Post by toolazytologin »

Razengan wrote: post #33
aorloff wrote: post #19

This article uses a lot of numbers to make not very strong arguments. Lets assume that as a media planner, you have the bag of money under your desk to plausibly be discussing buying a Superbowl spot. You are already spending millions of dollars on media every month, the question is - will the Superbowl spot yield more than other channels ? For some small set of advertisers in this decision matrix, there's also the q…

Sorry it's just f'ing bizarre we're talking about throwing TENS of millions for "advertising" instead of shit that actually benefits people and the world. Meanwhile some people complain about space programs etc. wasting money.

I don’t care about use of money that others spend freely. I do care about use of money that is forcibly confiscated from me.

(Not taking a position on space programs. Tax-funded programs deserve more inspection than privately-funded programs.)

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#47

Post by mrguyorama »

KurSix wrote: post #39
upmind wrote: post #11

I find the US commercialisation and dopamine inducing activities quite annoying. Compared to European sports, it's so different.

I think it reflects a broader difference in philosophy: US sports are optimized as media products first, sporting events second, whereas in Europe it's historically been the other way around

I was yet again shocked at just how little football is actually shown to viewers of the Superbowl. You cut away from commercials to already running plays. You miss everything.

The Superbowl cares more about viewers who don't watch football.

Luckily this time there wasn't much football to watch anyway.

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#48

Post by signatoremo »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #23
Swizec wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This has always bugged me. $7 million for a 30-second-long ad. What do they get out of it? Super Bowl ads are about brand building. They're not conversion ads. Their direct impact is to reduce CPC (cost per conversion) on other advertising. Say you have to pay $100 per instagram conversion. Users see your ads cold and need a lot of convicing. Most won't pay attention long enough for your ad to convert. You need them…

> Another study from 2015 showing that credit card logos increase estimates of item value Notably, the abstract of the 2015 study specifically points out that the 1986 study has frequently failed to replicate, and although it finds an effect, the 2015 study has n = 28. As always with psychology studies, we would do well not to assert their purported findings as facts, as with the statement "The brand effect is so str…

Not able to replicate an earlier study doesn’t mean that study is wrong. More likely that the assumptions and factors taken into consideration have changed, especially after almost 30 years. The pull of Visa brand may have declined, but the effect may be as strong or even stronger if it was replaced with, says, Apple.

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#49

Post by anonymous908213 »

signatoremo wrote: post #48
anonymous908213 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another study from 2015 showing that credit card logos increase estimates of item value Notably, the abstract of the 2015 study specifically points out that the 1986 study has frequently failed to replicate, and although it finds an effect, the 2015 study has n = 28. As always with psychology studies, we would do well not to assert their purported findings as facts, as with the statement "The brand effect is so str…

Not able to replicate an earlier study doesn’t mean that study is wrong. More likely that the assumptions and factors taken into consideration have changed, especially after almost 30 years. The pull of Visa brand may have declined, but the effect may be as strong or even stronger if it was replaced with, says, Apple.

I didn't say that it was wrong. I said that the field is murky and not suitable for such confident declarations of fact. "Putting a credit card logo on your checkout stimulates spending" is a very different sentence than "An experiment on 130 restaraunt customers and 150 college students found credit card logos stimulated spending among the people tested", and it is abundantly clear that sentences of the latter type do not reliably generalize to entire populations, because humans are ridiculously complex and it is somewhere between very hard and impossible to accurately control for all possible confounding factors. Do they sometimes generalize? I'm sure they do, but there are also times they don't, but the general populace treats them as though these experiments always do generalize reliably and allows them to influence their thinking and discussion of issues to an unearned degree. Such studies can be useful evidence towards a claim, but they are not proof of a claim.

Re: The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

#50

Post by aorloff »

baxtr wrote: post #22
aorloff wrote: post #19

This article uses a lot of numbers to make not very strong arguments. Lets assume that as a media planner, you have the bag of money under your desk to plausibly be discussing buying a Superbowl spot. You are already spending millions of dollars on media every month, the question is - will the Superbowl spot yield more than other channels ? For some small set of advertisers in this decision matrix, there's also the q…

As someone who is somewhat familiar with marketing but no expert, I always wondered how well attribution works. It seems all guesswork to me. User journeys and decisions are not well enough understood to say, "If I spend $1 here, it’ll return $x". Of course, marketing people come up with all kinds of calculations to show it’s possible. That or I’m completely ignorant.

> User journeys and decisions are not well enough understood to say

The power of math is its understanding of you, not your understanding of it.

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