Using Super Bowl Hype Without Spending Millions

A giant advertisement for Verizon covers Four Embarcadero above the Super Bowl City site in San Francisco, California.

The Verizon banner above, that covered a large portion of Four Embarcadero Center, was taken down on city orders prior to this year’s Super Bowl (Johnson, 2016).  According to San Francisco’s planning code, the reason for doing so was that ‘too much’ of the display was devoted to Verizon in proportion to the part dedicated to the Super Bowl – a civic event (Johnson, 2016).

According to the 2015 Neilsen Ratings, Super Bowl XLIX had an average audience of 114.4 million viewers (SuperBowl-Ads.com).  The Super Bowl is notoriously the most-watched television program of the year, so it should come as no surprise that ad space costs a pretty penny.  What is interesting is that despite these Super Bowl ads not really boosting sales, companies are continuing to pay a lot of money for them (“Why Super Bowl”, 2016).

This year, a thirty-second advertisement costs around 5 million dollars (“Why Super Bowl”, 2016).  For the smaller, not-so-wealthy companies, there is a slim chance that they can afford such prime real estate.  This means that these smaller companies have to find a way to use the Super Bowl’s hype to their advantage without paying top dollar?

The following is what I believe to be a successful utilization of the Super Bowl hype by a smaller company:

Newcastle Brown Ale did not buy any airtime in the 2014 Super Bowl (Nudd, 2014).  Instead, they chose to create a faux Super Bowl campaign that, along with the endorsement of Anna Kendrick, hijacked conversation surrounding Super Bowl marketing (Nudd, 2014).

With the Super Bowl fast approaching, take note of the advertisements televised during the game, but also note the campaigns created that, like the Newcastle campaign, are able to utilize the conversation surrounding the Super Bowl to their advantage without spending millions.

** Make sure to comment if you see any specific examples this weekend!

References:

Nudd, T. (2014, January 30). Anna Kendrick Isn’t ‘Beer Commercial Hot’ but Is Hilarious in Newcastle’s Super Bowl Campaign. Retrieved from http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/anna-kendrick-isnt-beer-commercial-hot-hilarious-newcastles-super-bowl-campaign-155337

Johnson, L. (2016, January 28). Huge ad for Verizon at Embarcadero Center coming down. Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Huge-building-ads-for-Verizon-Visa-must-6790468.php

Marans, D. (2016, February 5). Why Some Top Companies Decided Super Bowl Ads Aren’t Worth It. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/super-bowl-ads-not-worth-it_us_56b52312e4b01d80b2466dee?utm_hp_ref=super-bowl-commercials

SuperBowl-Ads.com Super Bowl Advertising News. Retrieved from http://superbowl-ads.com/

Why Super Bowl Advertisers Are OK That the Commercials Don’t Boost Sales – TIME -. (2016). Retrieved from http://superbowl-ads.com/super-bowl-advertisers-ok-commercials-dont-boost-sales-time/