Advertisers brainstorm, gear up for Super Bowl
Lured by the game's high TV ratings, companies spend millions on ads regarded by many viewers as the year's most entertaining.
BY BILL WILSON
The Wichita Eagle
Come Monday morning, a debate will be raging over the Super Bowl.
Not over who won, but about the best commercial on the day reserved for the advertising industry's best and brightest.
Pizza Hut's Hal McCoy and Eric Finkelstein, executive director for Associated Advertising, told a Wichita State University class Tuesday that the Super Bowl is a perfect time to trot out new products -- if those products have a tie to the feel around the game.
A 30-second spot this year will cost about $2.6 million, roughly half the total cost if a celebrity is involved.
It was money well-spent last year for Pizza Hut, which spent about $5 million to trot out a sultry Jessica Simpson pitching its new Cheesy Bites crust.
But it's also a questionable ad buy for some companies, Finkelstein said, ranging from GoDaddy, an Internet company, to the company that makes prostate drug Flomax.
Instead, the day should be reserved for companies to pitch products that tie into the football and party themes -- like Pizza Hut, Finkelstein said.
Take Diamond Foods, the nut company. It spends its entire advertising budget on Super Bowl Sunday.
"They built their brand image, and they boosted sales," he said.
That's why Pizza Hut is a heavy Super Bowl ad buyer in the days and hours leading up to the game, but not during the game, McCoy said.
"We find that we can get 90 percent of the return for 70 percent of the expenditure that way," he said.
The Cheesy Bites ad last year was Pizza Hut's biggest success, McCoy said, producing an estimated $25 million in public relations value.
That came as the company shifted its marketing from families to big eaters -- the young male demographic that made spending $1 million for Simpson's crust-wielding strut a must.
The Super Bowl of Advertising began in 1984, when Apple Computers scored big with a dramatic "1984" ad touting its then-new Macintosh computer line.
The Super Bowl attraction for companies is ratings, McCoy said. The game gets about twice the viewers of top-rated weekly shows.
"It's the Super Bowl of pizza, actually," he said. "It's our biggest day of the year, about twice the average Sunday. And our five biggest days in history have all been Super Bowl Sundays."
But, the ads can prove controversial. Simpson's seductive "These Boots Are Made for Walking" number in the 2006 ad offended some customers, McCoy said.
"It comes down to how many people are going to watch the show," he said.
That's why a broad cross-section of companies choose game day for a big ad blitz. Garmin, which makes GPS systems and has its operational headquarters in Kansas, will be among them Sunday.
"The Super Bowl is one of the few times people get together to watch TV and one of the few times bars fill up to watch," McCoy said.
"It's huge for everybody."
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