Foregoing the holy grail of the Super Bowl ad
February 3rd, 2008 | by mbhunter |With Super Bowl XLII mere hours away, I was looking around for how much the going advertising rates for the event would be. This year it’s $2.7 million per 30-second slot, up $100,000 from Super Bowl XLI. This is only a few cents per pair of eyeballs, though; the television audience could be close to 100 million. (It was about 93 million last year.) I found this number from a couple of sources after googling “super bowl advertising rates 2008.” One of them was the 2008 Super Bowl XLII Ad from the Student Loan Network. It was on the first page of results.
It’s a Super Bowl XLII ad, but don’t look for it during the game. It won’t be there. By StudentLoanNetwork.com’s calculations, there are many better things to do with $2.7 million than run an ad for 30 seconds, like 626 fully-funded Pell Grants or over 43,000 textbooks.
This is pretty smart marketing, actually. It plays on the notion that Super Bowl commercials are good. People have been blogging about them. For some viewers the commercials garner almost as much interest as the game itself. have almost as much of an interest as the teams. The usual suspects like GoDaddy.com are creating buzz around their ads. Super Bowl ads are big stakes, and it must be worth it for the companies that advertise there year after year. It’s too much money to waste for them not to be worth it.
StudentLoanNetwork.com decided it wasn’t worth spending a dime on it in the first place, and they still seem to find some of the same people watching their ads. “Enjoy the game without us,” they say. There’s still plenty of room outside of this annual event to get a whole lot of advertising in, at a tiny fraction of the cost, or for nothing at all.
This is good news for the rest of us.
2 Responses to “Foregoing the holy grail of the Super Bowl ad”
By Ron@TheWisdomJournal on Feb 3, 2008 | Reply
Yeah, I’m not going to advertise The Wisdom Journal on it either.
I would probably have to add that to my post: Bad Decisions That Cost Me Over $1,000 Each.
By used vans girl on Feb 4, 2008 | Reply
WOW that’s extortionate!! I wonder what percentage of the Super Bowl viewers actually see the ads. I would assume the adverts are a time to get more beer, food or a bathroom check.