In a little over two weeks, the advertising event of the year will happen. Super Bowl LII will take place on February 4th and will showcase not only the best football teams, but the most creative television advertising of the year. The Super Bowl draws the largest single event TV audiences year after year, and with the large viewership comes the highest TV advertising rates of the year. This year, it is reported that a 30 second spot will cost just north of $5 million to place. That is not the production costs, just the network fees for running the commercial. This is nothing new. Super Bowl ads have fetched top dollar for decades.

TV advertising is part of the old media. It is costly, hard to get a good read on how effective it really is, and is easily ignored (thanks to the DVR and online sources for viewing shows). However, a live event like the Super Bowl is still holding its own because it still attracts massive amounts of people and the commercials are certainly watched for their entertainment value. Creativity abounds at every break in the football action during the Super Bowl. However, in recent years, advertisers have spent as much on the placement of their Super Bowl ads as they have on integrating those ads across other platforms, particularly social media. Last year, it is estimated that corporations spent somewhere around $12 million each to place a Super Bowl ad on network TV, YouTube, and promote it across social media before it aired (yes, I said promote an ad! Super Bowl ads have their own teasers and trailers to get the market ready for their unveiling!)*

Marketing and creative business writer Cameron Foote claims that marketing has undergone three drastic phases in the last 50 years. The first phase was all about analysis – what should be communicated and what technique was best. The second phase was all about creativity in advertising. It emphasized attracting attention and ensuring memorability. The third phase centered on communicating in the most cost-effective manner possible. It came about as technology has become king. TV advertising was great through the first two phases, but started to get choked out as technology made placing an ad pennies-on-the-stack-of-hundred-dollar-bills more affordable. Technology has rivaled, and many times surpassed, TV for its ability to draw a large audience.**

I would suggest we are into a fourth phase. That is integration across all viable formats. We are inundated with marketing messages daily. How quickly do you become annoyed with an ad? How many times will you watch those expensive Super Bowl commercials until you are tired of seeing them? In our modern society, not long! Remember great ads like the Clydesdales playing football, the croaking Bud-weis-er frogs or the guys shouting "Whassup?” at their friends? These were all good at catching your attention until you had seen them so many times you ignored them. (When’s the last time you greeted someone by shouting, "Whassup” at them, a couple of decades?) This is where marketing integration helps. Marketing integration does something that is very important: it keeps your marketing message in front of your target in various formats, and in multiple places. You see it again and again, but you don’t see it in just one place. This is what is happening with Super Bowl ads. Advertisers are not depending upon one medium to carry their message. They are not even depending upon one source within a specific medium to carry their marketing message (ie. social media advertisers are purchasing spots on multiple formats such as Facebook, Google Ads, YouTube, etc.) This is not new. Marketers have been using integration for branding purposes for a long time. Think of the number of places Nike has put their logo with the tagline, "just do it!” It is so integrated into our thinking that we don’t even need the tagline any longer. Just the sight of the swoosh logo will generate the thought "just do it” in our brains (by the way, Nike has advertised on a number of Super Bowls quite effectively).

If you are in charge of your company’s marketing efforts, look carefully at the marketing integration that happens before and after the Super Bowl commercials this year. Use the same methods to promote your company’s brands. You may not be privileged to have a $12 million budget, but the same basics of marketing apply. Integrating a single branded message across multiple formats will keep it alive and memorable in the minds of your target market.

_________________

*According to Why Super bowl Ads are a Tough Sell in 2017 by Tim Calkins and Derek D. Rucker, Fortune.com, January 17, 2017

**The Business Side of Creativity by Cameron S. Foote, WW Norton and Company, p. 12