When it comes to high viewership American Television programs, The Superbowl is the big daddy of them all. The Superbowl garners over 100 Million viewers every year. The Nielsen Television rating agency gives it around a 40 rating and 60 shares, which means more than 100 million people from the US alone tune into the Superbowl at any given moment.
In these recent years, The Superbowl has grabbed global attention but not in terms of the sport but for its meticulously engineered ads that premiere every year. Having close to 100 million viewers at any given point in time is a golden opportunity for marketing heads to leverage their ads towards their target audience through this platform. The networks charge them close to $5.5 Million for a 30-second slot during the program. Even though this year's SuperBowl took a hit on the number of viewers, this did not stop brands from executing their strategies and reap returns.
While designing the perfect ad that can connect with the target audience and translate into better overall revenue, here are a couple of factors that can help during production
Differentiation: Is the Advertisement unique in its delivery?
Positioning: Is the right category represented and the benefit communicated well?
Attention: Does the advertisement engage the audience?
Amplification: Are the thoughts of the viewers favorable to the brand?
Relatability: Can the viewers connect well to the brand and its benefits?
Brand Equity: Is the ad consistent with the brand's reputation?
The most iconic Superbowl ad that achieved its goal was from Reddit. The past couple of weeks leading to the Superbowl, Reddit was responsible for the entire Gamestop controversy that shook the financial world. It was a very unique moment where ordinary citizens used the platform to join forces against the big hedge fund managers. Bringing people together for something bigger than themselves is something that all of us dream of. When a platform was able to achieve it, they wanted to broadcast it in the best way possible. But would they have the budget to do it? If not, how can they use the existing budget in the best way possible?
Reddit decided to spend their entire marketing budget, roughly $915,000, on a 5-second SuperBowl ad that became an iconic modern-day marketing strategy. They used an 11 sentence long image in between 2 car clips as a glitch in the 5-second interval. The ad was so strong that it intrigued the curiosity of the viewers and resulted in being the most searched brand during the Superbowl. The other competitors were miles apart from the inflow search volume in comparison with Reddit.
Another similar ad that got the attention of the viewers to get more viewership on the video was done by Mountain Dew. The brand used John Cena in the ad to introduce their new Watermelon flavor. The end of the video showed a clip of mountain dew bottles falling out of the car's trunk and Cena can be seen asking viewers to count the number of bottles, to stand a chance to win a $1 Million cash prize. This strategy helped the brand to incentivize users to invest more time in the video to grab an opportunity that could change their lives forever.
Whenever brands invest heavily in Marketing, there must be certain metrics to measure the efficacy of the campaign. ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is the most used metrics by all Marketing heads to measure their respective campaign ROIs. These are a couple of things to keep in mind to get the best out of your ROMI.
Aligning Marketing Objectives to Financial goals
Avoiding vanity metrics that don't serve your organizational goal
Optimizing the customer journey to garner better qualified Leads
Executing A/B testing before investing heavily to test the best approaches for reach and conversion
Stay committed to the decision and adapting only when it is absolutely required.
This year's SuperBowl ads were very interesting and different in terms of their vision and execution. Here is my list of the top 5 ads that did justice to the brand, the product, and the production.
Do let me know what was your favorite one from this year. :)