Readers in the U.S. know that the ‘Big Game’ is this weekend, and many of you will be watching it, either to watch the game itself or to see the very expensive advertisements. Here are a couple of things to ponder while you’re eating munchies and savoring the beverage of your choice:
1) A football game is a timed event — four quarters of fifteen minutes each. That’s a total of one hour of game time, yet even a regular-season football game rarely finishes in less than three hours. That means for every minute of game time you watch, you’ll be watching two minutes of filler, and this doesn’t include the pre-game and post-game programming. The Superbowl is worst of all, with pre-game programming that can last six or more hours. All for one hour of actual game time.
2) Because the Superbowl draws a gigantic audience (what marketers call “reach”), companies pay a big premium to buy advertising time during the game. So here’s my question: if a company advertises on the Superbowl — and pays big bucks to reach a big audience — then why do so few of these companies create superb, memorable ads for their expensive airtime? Time and time again, I’ve seen ads on the Superbowl that are the exact same insipid, worn-out old advertisement that a company has aired many times before. It’s a monumental waste of their ad budget. It’s like throwing a big, expensive party, inviting lots of people, renting a huge auditorium, hiring a band…and then serving stale food. Why spend the money on expensive airtime if you’re not going to use it to broadcast a fabulous ad that takes maximum advantage of that expensive airtime?
Well, those are two of my thoughts about Superbowl madness. What are yours?
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