Is a Super Bowl ad worth it?
A 30-second spot at this year’s Super Bowl will set you back a cool 7 million bucks. And even if you wanted one of those spots, you can’t have it — they’ve been gone for a while. That must mean these ads are like the proverbial goose laying golden eggs, right? Wrong!
Can a Super Bowl ad spot be a sensible investment? Perhaps in some cases, like for a low-awareness brand that needs a jolt of awareness or for a brand making a pivot that it needs a lot of people to know about. But has it worked out for all the blue-chip brands that gobble up the ad space as soon as it hits the market? We decided to check out a few brands that advertised in 2024 (most of which plan to advertise again in 2025) and see how they fared after their Super Bowl campaign.
Do Super Bowl campaigns create shareholder value?
Attribution analysis of advertising spend can be extremely complex and messy, and that’s not what we are doing here. Instead, we want to see if the brands that advertised did well for their shareholders in the months following the Super Bowl. We compare the stock price of the advertised brand with that of a close peer, and then we throw in the S&P 500 (to measure against overall market movement) and, if available, an industry index (to compare against the category).
Here’s how to easily read the charts below: The advertised brand is in green, the competitive brand is in orange, and the market or category indices are in black and gray. We’ve indexed the prices back to the day of Super Bowl 2024 so you can easily compare the advertised brand’s market performance versus that of the others.
Seven million dollars later …
Here are the findings for the four brands we analyzed:
Intuit has advertised its free online and premium paid tax software (Turbo Tax) in every Super Bowl since 2014 and plans to do so again in 2025. Since its 2024 Super Bowl ad, the company has consistently lagged the S&P 500 and, worse yet, significantly fallen short of its competitor, H&R Block, which has outperformed the market for most of the year.
In 2024, Toyota featured the Tacoma in its Super Bowl ad. The year has not been kind to the automobile industry, whose category stock performance has fallen well below the S&P. Toyota did stay ahead of the industry but, for the most part, trailed Honda’s performance.
Doordash has been advertising its delivery platform since 2022 and plans to do so again in Super Bowl 2025. After its 2024 campaign, which included a sweepstakes, Doordash pushed ahead of the S&P for a bit but since has had mixed results in beating the market, and unfortunately, it has trailed Grubhub by significant margins for the best part of the year following the Super Bowl.
Booking Holdings, like Doordash, has been advertising at the Super Bowl since 2022 and will be back in 2025. Immediately following the Super Bowl, its stock trailed the market and Expedia for a couple of months, made up some ground through the summer months, and since then has closely tracked Expedia. There is little in Booking Holdings’ stock performance to indicate a lift from the Super Bowl.
Ouch! What’s a marketer to do?
Granted that more analysis needs to be done to truly determine the ROI of a Super Bowl ad (or, for that matter, any ad), but when you sink that much money into an ad campaign and your stock has nothing to show for it, it raises red flags. There are two stark lessons here for any marketer planning a campaign of any size or significance:
You are ultimately answerable to the shareholder (or equivalent stakeholders in private companies) for whom you create value, so you must orient your metric around demonstrating outcomes for the enterprise. That’s how you demonstrate your utility to the business.
You better be buttoned up on the numbers if you’re pitching marketing campaigns in an environment where your company performance clearly trails your peers. Can you prove that this is the best use of money compared to everything else the company could do with those funds?
If I were the CMO at any of these companies that are limping along despite massive ad spend, I’d be telling my CEO that we would be far worse off if we did not make that marketing investment. But, and this is a big but, I’d have to have the numbers to back it up. Better yet, I’d make sure those numbers came with my CFO’s stamp of approval.
(Tyler Castro contributed to the analyses and research for this post.)
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