What You Get for a $5 Million Super Bowl Ad vs. POS Marketing

Personal Super Bowl Experience

Just like in prior years, my wife and I went to a neighbor’s house to watch the Super Bowl along with 10 to 12 other neighbors. 

Each year we find the game to be so over-hyped that it rarely lives up to the billing “Super.”  Of course, this year it was different, especially in the fourth quarter.

Here’s the routine: 

People usually talk during the game, but pause to give their full attention to the 105” high-def. screen during the first few seconds of every commercial. We typically love the food and drink commercials — although this year they didn’t have the same pull as the one’s in prior years.  This year the commercials were either dark, or “high-concept”, or “meant-to-be-but-weren’t funny”, with the possible the exception of the Melissa McCarthy KIA spots.

What Does It Cost?

The cost for a 30 second TV spot - $5 million! And that’s not including production costs. 

The audience was huge - 111 million, but wasn’t record setting. 

A lot of money for excellent “reach”, but based on our neighborhood poll, the money wasn’t really well spent but with one exception. 

When the Alfa Romeo’s Giulia ad came on, people’s cell phones came out to Google the location of the nearest dealership in the Cincinnati area. Turns out it’s 60 miles away in Dayton. So we’re not sure if any Giulia’s will be sold because of the ad.

What’s The Goal?

The goal of advertising should be to turn a shopper into a buyer!

Surveys show there has been quite a bit of “erosion” of interest in watching TV spots for most consumer packaged goods — especially beverages like soda, water, beer and wine. 
Even when there is interest, like prior year’s Super Bowls, it’s more because the spot was humorous or touching. Remember the dogs and horses touching friendship? The product: Budweiser. 

However studies confirm the “forget-ability” of what brand the spot was advertising. 

For many package goods, especially beverage alcohol, advertising’s richness seems more desirable than its reach. 

But Wait A Minute

The logic has always been that with a population of hundreds of millions of people, TV advertising is the only affordable way to reach the maximum possible market size.

So for $5 million you can reach 100 million people?  At that rate, the cost per viewer “reached” is around a penny per viewer. 

But for products like beer, simply reaching a large number of potential audience members because the show you’re watching is very popular doesn’t make as much sense as it did even at the turn of the century. 

Today’s TV Audiences

People typically use TV commercial breaks as an opportunity to pick up their cell phones and check their messages or pick up the game they were playing where they left off at the last commercial break. In short, an increasing number of advertisers are coming to the conclusion that even with a huge audience size, they’re not reaching anywhere near as many potential customers as the theoretical data regarding “reach” suggests — and message richness, well, not much of that either. 

The Perfect Combination — TV and POS

Point-of-sale advertising, or POS, on the other hand, offers the advertiser the opportunity for the audience (shoppers), to see a message full of rich and to-the-point content. 

Unlike maximum reach forms of engagement, POS provides the ability to track the precise costs to create and place the message; and unlike broadcast and print advertising, allows the advertiser to measure the impact and ROI of the advertising message.

Although it may be difficult to measure the reach POS, it’s relatively easy to determine its richness. Just take a look at its cost and correlate that to the impact of that POS on sales and therefore its ROI.

Traditional TV ads can claim measurable cost-per-thousand viewers, but unlike POS, it is very difficult to measure TV ads impact on sales. 

Based on the importance of number of potential views of a brand’s ad vs. a measurable impact on sales, or some combination of both - TV spots for reach or POS for richness - should be deployed. 

However, to most of our customers and prospects (beer, wine and spirits wholesalers), impacting sales is the most desirable effect.

POS First!

We’ve come to this point: 

The continued success of beverage alcohol - sales growth, market share, and new brand launches - increasingly relies on a “POS-First” approach to marketing.

The importance of POS to increase sales and build brand awareness continues to accelerate and grow especially for consumer goods.

Yet it has only been recently that beer, wine and spirits distributors — the source of virtually all at-retail (POS) advertising — have started to track, measure and manage this most important piece of their marketing initiatives. 

That where OnTrak comes in. We offer a full suite of products that track POS from order entry through production and placement and provides powerful reporting tools that provides wholesale distributors the capability of reporting on POS costs, placement, and correlation of POS deployment to product sales. 

In the final analysis, untracked POS ordering, production and placement will likely continue to be your largest marketing expense. If you’re not measuring and managing your at-retail marketing campaigns, then you’re missing a great opportunity for success.

To gain and retain a competitive marketing advantage you need technology like the Digital Toolsâ„¢ from OnTrak. To learn more about all our products, click here >> Software

But the best way to see the value of all of our products is to view a live, online demonstration. 

Click the following link to: Request a Demo, or call one of our product experts at 513-936-4041.