A post-game empirical analysis by programmatic ad platform Rocket Fuel shows almost no lift or conversion benefit to Super Bowl advertising for auto makers. (I made a similar argument here.) The company then goes on to examine what marketers could have done online with the $4.5 million they spent on a single 30-second spot.
Rocket Fuel hypothesizes that it would have cost roughly $3.8 million (using an average $1.50 cpm) to buy every single impression available on the digital ad exchanges (roughly 2,542,573,344) during the entire Super Bowl across the internet.
One brand could thus have effectively taken over the internet for four hours for $700,000 less than what a single 30 second ad cost on NBC during the game.
Spent differently, the company says the money could buy or have bought any one of the following:
11-day takeover of the YouTube homepage
9-day takeover of Turner Networks’ affiliated web pages (which includes TNT.tv, CNN.com, NBA.com, AdultSwim.com, etc.)
45 days of standalone ads on Facebook’s logout page
37 days of sponsored trending on Twitter
All of this points to the inefficiency of traditional TV advertising vs. digital. And while digital media certainly have their challenges and inefficiency (see viewability), increasingly online and mobile ads are trackable to the point of sale — offline.
Location intelligence platform PlaceIQ is starting to enable select TV advertising to be tracked offline as well, by matching set-top boxes with smartphones (anonymously). Indeed, mobile devices can be used generally as a tool to track the effectiveness of other media channels.
It doesn’t appear however that any of these techniques were/are being pursued by marketers who spent the big money on game day. We’ll see if more brands get wise next year and opt-out.
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