But is launching a new product on one of the biggest game days of the year really worth the $7 million-plus price tag for a single ad? After all, you could just as easily reach an equivalent audience by making several smaller bets on other high-profile programs, even if those broadcasts don’t have the cultural cachet of the Super Bowl.
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering whether the Super Bowl is an ROI-positive vehicle for promoting your new product, consider this: It isn’t really about a single ad airing.
In fact, when brands advertise a new product during the Super Bowl, consumers don’t just engage with the ad while it airs—research finds they’re actually more likely to seek out the product when they see ads for it in the weeks and months afterward.
In other words, advertising during the Super Bowl creates a halo effect for new products that makes a brand’s ads more effective for weeks after the final whistle. Whether you’re assessing the impact of your Big Game Day expenditure or your decision to sit on the sideline, this halo effect needs to be part of your calculus.
Just look at what some recent advertisers were able to accomplish in the weeks after the game.
How Reese’s, Kia, and Popeyes built post-game engagement
What makes the Super Bowl special isn’t just that it allows advertisers to reach the largest TV audience of the year in an increasingly fragmented media landscape. It’s that the audience is qualitatively different from the ones that tune into other TV programming.
Super Bowl Sunday is the one day of the year when millions of Americans tune into an event primarily to watch the ads, and advertisers rise to meet expectations with new, state-of-the-art creatives designed to wow the audience. As a result, these viewers are more engaged with the ads they see, more open-minded about the products those ads promote, and more likely to consider those products in the weeks after the game. All of this is reflected in the data acquired during and after the game.
As you might imagine, the Super Bowl delivers more ad-driven consumer engagement than any program all year. In fact, you’d have to buy more than 400 ads on the average primetime broadcast or cable program to generate the same engagement as a single Game Day spot. Still, the post-game halo effect might come as a surprise.
Take how last year’s Super Bowl turned around Reese’s campaign for its recently released Caramel Big Cup. In the 2.5 months prior to the game, ads for the product were actually 37% less likely than the average candy ad to generate consumer engagement.
But in the two weeks after Reese’s debuted a new creative for the product at the Big Game? Ads for the new candy were more than 5X as effective as they’d been previously—and more than 3X as effective as the average candy ad during the same period. The impact of its Super Bowl ad lasted even longer. In the two months following the game, ads for the Caramel Big Cup were still 175% more effective than they’d been before the Big Game.
There have been similar boosts beyond the CPG category for automakers like Kia and quick-serve restaurant brands like Popeyes. And this impact has been present across Super Bowl ads over the past few years.
In the month after debuting a new spot for the EV6 during 2022’s Super Bowl LVI, Kia’s ads for the product were 46% more effective than ads for the other models it had been promoting in the months prior. Popeyes saw a 14% bump after its Super Bowl LVIII spot, the first airing of a creative promoting its new chicken wings with an assist from the comedian and actor Ken Jeong.
If you have a new product to advertise during the Big Game, you’ll want to debut an exciting new creative at the game—and to make sure you’re putting ads in prominent rotation in the months after.
All the pieces matter on Game Day
As a singular cultural event, the Super Bowl is too big for TV marketers to ignore. Regardless of whether you ultimately choose to debut your new product during the game, you’ll be discussing this key decision with company stakeholders and keeping a close eye on what your competitors have chosen to do on the big stage.
With so much riding on this key decision, it’s not enough to rely on your gut or an incomplete picture of how a Big Game ad will impact your new product launch. Rather, you need to assess the complete costs and benefits of a great Super Bowl campaign before, during, and after the game.
Then, and only then, can you make the best possible decision for your brand.
Source: adweek.com
