Humorous ads create S.B. loyalty

January 31, 2005 —

When the Super Bowl kicks off on Feb. 6, the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles will send million-dollar athletes on to the field to battle for the title of champion. While they take their commercial "break," the real battle will begin when advertisers send their million-dollar ads to their playing field to battle for the title of "the next Budweiser Frog."

The 2003 Super Bowl was a disappointment. The lopsided game featured the Tampa Bay Buccaneers squashing the Oakland Raiders 48-21 in front of a San Diego crowd of over 67,000 and a worldwide television audience in the vicinity of 800 million. Though some may have a difficult time recalling a few of the game's highlights, many vividly remember the words of one man.

"This referee's a jackass."

Though it would not be surprising if one of the 800 million people watching screamed those words at their television, the words themselves, and the words that followed, came from within the TV itself.

"Nope. I believe that's a zebra."

The phrase comes from a popular Budweiser ad featuring a zebra referee reviewing a close play during a Clydesdale football game. The Clydesdale game itself was featured in an ad during a previous Super Bowl, further solidifying the fact that the commercials are a big deal and almost seem to carry a life of their own.

This year, Super Bowl XXXIX will feature 59 30-second spots bought up by feature players such as Anheuser-Busch, McDonald's and Pepsi but also relative newcomers like CareerBuilder.com and GoDaddy.com. Warner Brothers is expected to debut ads for their upcoming films Batman Begins and The Dukes of Hazard while Cadillac, Sony, Fed-Ex and Subway are also expected to run spots.

The cost of this year's Super Bowl ads, as expected, set a new all-time high. Advertisers will pay around $2.4 million for a half-minute commercial compared to $400,000 for a typical television ad. Both figures are astronomically higher than the $40,000 it cost for 30 seconds of ad time during the inaugural Super Bowl in 1967.

What motivates advertisers to spend millions of dollars is quite simple: exposure. The Super Bowl is the most watched television program in the United States. The Washington Post has reported that almost 10 percent of the 800 million television viewers claim to watch the game for the commercials alone. For companies both big and small, this type of immediate recognition warrants the high spending.

The element that truly sets Super Bowl commercials apart is their entertainment value. Ads are just as focused on entertaining viewers as they are on selling products. This happens because advertisers know that an entertaining commercial will draw larger discussion after the game and score better on the countless fan ratings that appear immediately after. If an advertiser gets really lucky, their ad will live on for years to come, in prominent rankings such as the recent list on ESPN.com.

There, ads like Apple's famous 1984 "Macintosh-Big Brother" spot or McDonald's "Showdown" (featuring Michael Jordan and Larry Bird playing "HORSE" for a Big Mac) will remain fresh in the minds of viewers and the advertisers – $2.4 million can live on forever in the annals of Super Bowl lore.