Super Bowl? More like Super-OOH
Whether you are an NFL fan or not, the Super Bowl garners massive awareness every year for the big, expensive and splashy ads. But are the ads memorable? Ben Baker, managing director, APAC at Vistar Media, thinks they may not be, unless they have the right supporting channels.
Last year the NFL estimated that Super Bowl LVII garnered the eyes of 115 million people around the world.
If it’s not for the game, these viewers are there for the ads. Celebrated by the advertising and creative communities internationally, Super Bowl ads cost brands a whopping $10 million dollars for a 30 second spot.
PepsiCo’s 2024 Super Bowl ad featuring singer Ice Spice
Obviously, these eye watering sums are completely unaffordable for most brands but, there are other ways advertisers can achieve success through more purposeful and sustained messaging.
Thinking back to the ‘marketing rule of 7’ (which has been around since the 1930’s), customers need to hear or see a brand’s message at least seven times before they make a purchase.
While merely a marketing principle, there’s certainly some truth here. With so many brands vying for attention today, being where your customers are, is what will ensure that your product is what they reach for in the store or, click on when scrolling the internet.
Let’s say you could afford to place an ad in the Super Bowl, studies show you would see an increase in word-of-mouth marketing the month following the game, but the results would be short-lived.
Following Super Bowl LVII (2023), this research shows that in fact the biggest winners of them all were the brands in the same product categories as the Super Bowl advertisers (in this instance non-Super Bowl advertising brands such as Corona Extra, Kraft Mayo and Lay’s STAX). These non-advertisers appeared to benefit nearly as much as the advertisers investing in the big game themselves. Imagine! $10 million dollars later and your competitor benefited as much as you did.
However, if a brand chooses to integrate their TV and digital advertising efforts with OOH advertising to create an omnichannel campaign, they can potentially unlock an additional 26% in returns, according to oOh!media.
Pringles’ 2024 Super Bowl ad featuring actor Chris Pratt
By leveraging an omnichannel campaign strategy and the accompanying technology, such as programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH), advertisers can optimise their campaigns in real-time, maximising their impact and efficiency. This ensures that ads are strategically placed where customers are most likely to engage with them.
Then, if the audience’s behaviour shifts, advertisers have the agility to quickly adjust the creative messaging, and when and where the ad runs, to ensure it’s reaching the right people, at the right times, with the right messages.
The dynamic nature of pDOOH empowers brands to make data-driven decisions, creating improved campaign performance and a higher return on investment. While Super Bowl ads command attention on a single screen, the number of opportunities presented by omnichannel campaigns and OOH advertising allows brands to be noticed by customers more regularly. Using diverse advertising channels enhances brand recognition and recall, even if it only takes seven exposures for a customer to remember a brand.
While Super Bowl ads draw an enormous amount of attention, coupling them with a strong OOH campaign presents a more sustainable and cost-effective strategy for brand recognition.
Emphasising sustained and purposeful marketing activities over a one-time splash, through an out-of-home or programmatic digital out-of-home campaign, will offer a consistently higher return on investment in the long run, compared to a $10 million, 30-second TV spot.
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