Is A Super Bowl Ad Worth It? That’s The Wrong Question.

With a price tag of up to $10 million for a 30-second TV spot, a Super Bowl ad doesn’t come cheap. A brand could take that same bounty and put it toward direct marketing on social platforms, like Instagram or TikTok, and generate well over a billion impressions on a format that has proven to be a much more effective vehicle than old-fashioned TV advertising for consumer search and discovery. So what brings brands back year after year to the Super Bowl, ready and willing to shell out a king’s ransom?

A Super Bowl ad is right for two kinds of brands and wrong for one kind.

The first kind of brand that the Super Bowl is right for is one whose growth is constrained by low salience and needs an awareness jolt to get growth going – like 2022’s bouncing QR code that propelled Coinbase from obscurity to Main Street. Of course, awareness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for growth, so this kind of advertising strategy only makes sense if the rest of the company is ready to deliver what, at Forrester, we call “Total Experience” – simply put, making sure that the promise of advertising is backed up by the customer experience. In this Super Bowl, Anthropic’s Claude, which trails significantly behind Gemini and ChatGPT in awareness and usage, will look to make up ground on salience.

The second kind of brand for which $10 million may be well spent is one that sees this as an opportunity to cement itself in the collective consciousness. The Super Bowl is not just a sporting event; it’s a quintessentially American cultural phenomenon. Brands that play the long game weave themselves into the fabric of this culture. The Super Bowl delivers cultural relevance in spades, and $10 million is the cost of entry. Budweiser’s Clydesdales and bald eagles will, in yet another Super Bowl ad, continue to remind Americans of its Americanness. If you’ve wondered why you often see the same big companies show up during the Super Bowl, it’s because that’s precisely what they are trying to do – to show up over and over again, so they come to mind first when the consumer is ready to act.

What about the kind of brand that should not advertise during the Super Bowl? That’s probably the bulk of brands that neither need nor can afford the salience boost, as well as those that have not yet reached the maturity to launch a sustained program of cultural relevance and will find better use for their marketing dollars elsewhere. But the one kind of brand that should not consider the Super Bowl is the one that scrutinizes every cent of marketing spend. Is a Super Bowl ad worth it? ROI models for marketing are built on extremely complex and often shaky assumptions, which, with gentle persuasion, can be coaxed in either direction. If a company is asking whether Super Bowl ad spend is worth it, it’s probably asking the wrong question. More than the CMO, the CEO should know the answer in their gut. Steve Jobs never put the Apple brand on any page other than a magazine’s back cover, its most coveted and expensive real estate. He didn’t need an ROI model for that.

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Learn more: Salience is one of five levers that drive growth. Forrester clients can read about it, along with all the other levers, in my research on how brands grow.

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