Steelers or Cardinals? I actually don’t care about either team, so I’m just not sure. But the Super Bowl will be good as always for one thing: the ads.
But according to today’s WSJ, Super Bowl ads are ditching kitchy for hard-sell, immediate action.
In a sign of the times, many of the Super Bowl ads this year – which are going for a whopping $3 million for a 30 second spot (and that doesn’t include all the production costs of making the dang commercial in the first place) – are going for a more value-driven approach and focusing on getting people to act: either with packaged offerings, like Teleflora’s $29.99 Valentine’s bouquet, or by promoting website visits (cash4gold.com),
Also, we should expect less “funny” and more emotional or nostalgic ads, that play off of the gloomy times we are in.
With this current economic climate, advertisers will need to promote value and hard-selling while balamcing the need to maintain their brand image to one of the largest audiences for a single event. I just think we’re going to see less “brand image” ads this year.
In an unrelated article earlier this week, there was talk of more digital interactivity with Super Bowl ads – promoting special websites, integrating texting or cell phone ads, or leading people to go online to a certain page or take certain actions. The idea being to leverage the 30 seconds into other activity. It will be interesting to see what ideas the advertisers come up with in that regard.
