Costly Super Bowl Ads Pay Publicity Dividends

By SUZANNE VRANICA

At about $3.8 million for a 30-second spot, an ad on this year's Super Bowl was easily the most expensive ad buy on television. For marketers, though, buying a spot during the big game may be the most efficient media play on Madison Avenue.
That's only partly because of the huge audience for the game—111 million people watched last year, according to Nielsen.
The other major benefit of a Super Bowl ad is the free media attention the spots attract, which can more than justify their cost.
Super Bowl ads get a "ripple of media that adds up to enormous value above and beyond the spot itself," says Tony Pace, chief marketing officer of Subway.
The fast-food chain bought two Super Bowl ads this year; one ad features its cast of pitchmen, including Jared Fogle and Olympian Apolo Ohno. The ads have been mentioned and written about in several newspapers and on several news websites.
Mr. Pace says he believes the spots, which his company made public only shortly before the game, would receive about a half-million dollars worth of free publicity even before the game airs.
Mercedes-Benz, another Super Bowl advertiser, agrees. Thanks in part to the publicity from media outlets, "we have easily recouped our investment," says Steve Cannon, chief executive of Mercedes-Benz USA unit, which bought a 60-second ad during the game. The spot features celebrities such as pop star Usher, supermodel Kate Upton and actor Willem Dafoe.
Mr. Cannon declined to disclose the luxury auto brand's Super Bowl spending but says it was an "eight-figure investment." Mercedes-Benz, a unit of Germany's Daimler AG, DAI.XE -0.53% estimates it has received about $20 million in free media coverage of the ad.
Mercedes-Benz says the ad has been mentioned in many major newspapers around the U.S. and on many TV news and entertainment programs on networks including Fox, CNN, NBC and ESPN. Mr. Cannon appeared in many of the television news stories.
Over the past few weeks, Mercedes-Benz's internal public-relations team has been fielding more than 50 inquiries a day from various media, said Donna Boland, the company's manager of corporate communication. It also has two outside public-relations firms working on generating media attention.
Ad executives credit Apple Inc.'s AAPL -0.41% famous 1984 Super Bowl spot, in which a young female athlete shatters an image of Big Brother, for helping transform the game into an advertising showcase, where marketers compete to produce lavish, never-seen-before spots. That ad helped attract extra attention from the media—newscasts rebroadcast Apple's commercial, treating it as a story, according to "The Super Bowl of Advertising," Bernice Kanner's 2004 book on the subject.
Over time the media coverage expanded. In 2002, PepsiCo PEP -0.25% estimated it got $10 million in free publicity for its 90-second Super Bowl ad featuring Britney Spears.
Many advertisers hire extra public-relations firms to help promote their Super Bowl spots to a growing list of interested media outlets, including late-night talks shows, morning news programs, newspapers, bloggers and online video shows.
In the past couple of years, marketers also have begun putting out teasers of their ads on the Web days or weeks ahead of the game. Many are going so far as to put their full ads out days before the game.
Some advertisers also have generated publicity by getting consumers involved. Doritos, a brand owned by PepsiCo's Frito-Lay, has enlisted consumers in creating and selecting its big-game ads for the past seven years. The snack brand estimates it generated about $90 million in free advertising from last year's Super Bowl effort.