There’s still a lot of Halloween candy in the house — and the holiday tree isn’t even up — but that hasn’t stopped Madison Avenue marketers from moving on to the next big thing: Superbowl XLIX.
The Superbowl, an extravaganza that often causes viewers to better recall the commercials than the final score, is front burner now. It’s about three months away. In advertising speak, that’s right around the corner.
“Among the brands that have acknowledged buying commercials from NBC in the game on February 1 are Doritos, which will, for the ninth time, sponsor a consumer ad-making contest called Crash the Super Bowl; Loctite glue, which will become a Super Bowl advertiser for the first time and put almost its entire 2015 ad budget into a spot; and Mercedes-Benz, which told a reporter on Thursday that it would return to the Super Bowl but deferred discussing details until later,” noted Stuart Elliott in the media section of The New York Times.
“There have also been reports about other potential Super Bowl advertisers like McDonald’s, which, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, will use the game to bring out a major new campaign meant to address a serious sales slump,” Elliott observes.
But evidence of this holiday-bypass is everywhere.
For instance, Visa — a longtime NFL sponsor — is already blasting out emails to cardholders with information on how they can win a trip to the big game next February… “courtesy of Visa,” of course.
The serious rushing yards for digital marketers is partly something old: the earlier and earlier promotion of holidays to induce greater sales. And it’s also something new: an acknowledgment of the role that social media plays in promotion today.
“Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube… make it much easier to discuss and share Super Bowl spots well before the game, which encourages advertisers to speak up sooner than they did in previous years,” explains Elliott. “Another reason it makes sense to stimulate word of mouth for Super Bowl spots before Thanksgiving is the hefty sums involved: Given how much the commercials cost, it may never be too soon to start amortizing the expense.”
Word is that NBC’s asking price for a 30 second spot during the Superbowl is a hefty $4.5 million. That is about 12.5 percent higher than the estimated $4 million Fox Broadcasting charged in 2014.
Elliott believes one reason for an early push is “a recent softening in demand for commercial time on television, as shown by the third-quarter financial reports of media companies like Discovery Communications and 21st Century Fox.”
