Why the Super Bowl? They have their reasons

130 million armchair reviewers
Super Bowl commercials offer some unique fringe benefit, including a few tickets to the game that advertisers can use to entertain clients or partners. A Super Bowl also stokes employee morale, and advertisers generate an unusual amount of free media attention, like this article.

But by far the biggest attraction for advertisers is that Super Bowl Sunday is just about the only day of the year when the advertising commands as much attention as the programming. At a typical Super Bowl party, everyone becomes an armchair ad reviewer, and a substantial minority say the ads are the main reason they tune in.

CareerBuilder.com Animals are always popular in Super Bowl ads, including this spot from CareerBuilder.com.

“There are very few venues where the advertisements are as much of an ingrained experience as the content of the event itself,” said Richard Castellini, vice president, consumer marketing at CareerBuilder.com, a job postings Web site that is rolling out  a major national ad push with two Super Bowl spots.

Castellini took great pains to distance his company from the dot-com failures of a few years back, as did Bob Parsons, founder and president of GoDaddy.com, which will kick off a $19 million national marketing campaign in the first quarter of Sunday’s game.

“It’s not a gamble,” said Parsons, who is the sole stockholder in GoDaddy, an Internet domain registrar.

“We have been the leader in our market for three years,” he said. “If this year’s marketing budget does not produce one dollar in additional sales, we’ll still throw off $14 million in cash. I’ll still be supersizing it at McDonald’s.”

Ingredients for success
Conventional wisdom – and some market research – holds that Super Bowl advertisers need humor, animals, celebrities or some combination to be well-liked and effective. Categories that fit in well with the day’s partying mood do well, experts say. Sober subjects like financial services and pharmaceuticals typically get the thumbs-down.

CIBA Vision A scene from a Super Bowl ad for contact lenses.

So CIBA Vision will be bucking the odds when it makes its Super Bowl debut -- an atmospheric spot promoting the benefits of its new O2 contact lenses.

Karen Gough, CIBA Vision’s president for the Americas, makes no apologies for the straightforward approach. The ad is chiefly targeted at women, who constitute about half the Super Bowl audience but two-thirds of contact lens wearers, she said.

“I think it’s important to note that we didn’t develop the campaign with the Super Bowl in mind,” Gough said. “We developed the campaign to communicate to our core audience. We just picked the Super Bowl as a way to get that campaign across to a broad range of viewers.”

While the Super Bowl is a great place to reach a lot of eyeballs, including those that need corrective lenses, it only works in the context of an integrated marketing campaign, she and others agreed.

“If you’re going to spend the money, you need to leverage it beyond the 30 seconds,” said Sandy McBride, marketing vice president of Emerald Nuts, another first-timer.

The snack-nut maker, a new brand developed by a 93-year-old walnut farmers' cooperative, will promote its Super Bowl spot with a full-page newspaper ad before the game. And viewers will be encouraged to log on to a clever Web site after the game to continue the story begun in its commercial, which features Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and a unicorn.

With humor, mythical animals, a mythical celebrity and snack food, the ad has all the ingredients of a potential Super Bowl classic.

GoDaddy.com An ad for technology company GoDaddy.com appears to make reference to a certain wardrobe malfunction.

GoDaddy.com, on the other hand, is courting controversy with an ad that appears to portray an attractive young woman losing her blouse at a hearing on broadcast censorship. Parsons, the GoDaddy founder, promised that the spot would be “in extremely good taste.”

“It’s fun and it's not tawdry,” he said.

And how will we know whether the ad succeeded?

“Watch the 2006 Super Bowl,” he said. “If I’m back in it, it worked.”

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