Super Ads

Watching yesterday’s game, it occurred to me: Super Bowl commercials really are “Super Ads.”  Costing advertisers around $3 million for 30 seconds, a Super Bowl commercial is some of the most costly air time a company can purchase.  That’s not to mention the millions that companies pour into actually producing the commercial itself.  Why are all these millions of dollars spent?  It’s all spent with the hope that it will resonate with the millions and millions of viewers who tune into network TV for the big game.

Millions of dollars for millions of impressions.  Seems like a fair trade.  But just how super are these Super Ads?  Advertisers who buy a Super Bowl ad invest so much in the hope of converting a small, tiny fraction of the audience into customers.  They hope that they can outshine their competition – competition that can’t afford a Super Ad.

That kind of thinking is beginning to disappear.  As super as they are, Super Bowl ads are becoming a less and less optimal way to convert impressions into customers.  Before the days of the Internet, television advertising was the best form of advertising out there.  It relied on pushing your product to as many people as possible.  The more impressions an ad made, the more buyers you would have at the end of the sales funnel.

But in today’s world, there’s a better way to increase the chances of turning impressions into buys.  Facebook, Twitter, SEO, Google AdWords, and the plethora of other web marketing tools that reach out to specific audiences are the real super ads of today.  Where a Super Bowl ad targets almost all of America, these tools allow advertisers to target specific niches and reach potential customers where they actually are.  While they may not reach millions, they reach the people that count.

And it’s giving smaller competitors an advantage.  Targeted web marketing levels the playing field more than any other marketing medium and that thought is beginning to scare the big players.  It’s anyone’s game now.  You don’t need millions of dollars anymore to get just as many customers as a Super Bowl ad would produce.  All you need is an Internet connection and a strong game plan.