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Scores for the sports part of Super Bowl XLV are easily interpreted, but for the advertising part of the 2011 Super Bowl event the winners are not as clear. If the U.S. retail industry measures Super Bowl XLV by its biggest advertising bet payoff, its non-attendance strategies, and its new media marketing activities, then the first major event on the 2011 retail sales calendar was a success. If you're looking for retail Super Bowl success in the blur of car commercials or in some tangible post-Super Bowl sales results, the scores for the retail industry might not be as easy to calculate.
>> See all the retail Super Bowl XLV commercials >>
Papa John's placed the biggest Super Bowl bet in retail industry history and got an equally big payoff when Super Bowl XLV was played and won without any overtime. If Super Bowl XLV had gone into overtime, the Papa of pizza chains would have owed every registered member of its customer loyalty club a free pizza. Since that didn't happen, Papa John's is walking away from Super Bowl XLV with untold numbers of newly registered loyalty program participants, that it didn't cost them very much dough to acquire.
Populating the Papa Points program just with the promise of a potential premium is a perfect promotion. (Say that three times fast.) Unlike when Denny's generously invited every man, woman, and child in America to a free breakfast during the Recession Bowl of 2009, Papa John's won good will points just by demonstrating the willingness to give give away a large amount of free food, but not actually having to do it. Brilliant!
If Papa John's had lost its overtime pizza payout bet, the supernova of media mentions associated with that historic event would have yielded the 3rd largest U.S. pizza delivery chain the world's best post-game publicity for a Super Bowl non-advertiser. I predict that Papa John's has now created the model for winning big by NOT advertising in a Super Bowl.
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Traditional TV Super Bowl commercials are so yesterday anyway. Many were referring to this year's Super Bowl as the Transmedia Bowl because of the way the Super Bowl advertisers integrated their traditional media buys with new media and social media strategies. I think those Transmedia Bowl pundits weren't paying much attention last year when the biggest spotlights of Super Bowl XLIV were shining on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube before, during, and after the game.
This year, Audi was bragging about its use of Twitter to engage people with its Super Bowl advertising. Tweeters who used the hashtag label "#Progressis" following the airing of the Audi 60-second Super Bowl commercial became eligible to win a test-drive of an Audi R8.
From my front row seat couch-side Super Bowl seat, I see two big challenges with this Audi promotion. First, tweeters think "your" and "you're" are both spelled "ur," and yet they are expected to be able to spell "Progressis?" Challenge #2 - The prize of this Audi promotion is a test drive? Seriously? Audi can hand over $6 million for a one-minute commercial, but they can't hand over car keys to the grand prize winner for more than an hour?
If you're going to make Tweeters spell big words, I think you at least need to give them something they can take home as a souvenir in return for their effort. That just seems fair.
Another questionable Super Bowl promotion prize from the retail industry was the win-a-workout with Kim Kardashian giveaway. Admittedly, I do not understand the widespread fascination with the Kardiashians, but it seems like crazed Kardashian fans are tabloid people, not shape-up people. So, while I'm sure there was an impressive number of gossip-loving starmongers who were willing to post a Kim Kardashian video on their Facebook wall after her heavily hyped commercial aired during the Super Bowl, I question whether this will actually translate to sales of $100 shape-up shoes, even if they do have pink shoe laces.
Super Bowl Marketing Activity vs. Super Bowl Marketing Accomplishment
While the Green Bay Vs. Pittsburgh battle was being played on the field, the marketing activity vs. marketing accomplishment battle was being played on every digital broadcast channel available to Super Bowl advertisers. While it's nice for companies to be able to connect with their customers in an infinite number of ways, if all the socializing doesn't eventually connect these companies to customer credit card transactions, then it's much a-post about nothing.
Perhaps uncertainty about how to translate multi-million dollar multimedia Super Bowl advertising into hard retail sales is the reason why so many retail companies sat on the Superbowl advertising sidelines this year. If not for the aggressive participation of automobile advertisers, the U.S. retail industry would only have been represented by Teleflora, Skechers (SKX), and Best Buy (BBY), which is not exactly an impressive retail trio.
The most aggressive of the automobile retailers in the Super Bowl XLV lineup was General Motors (GM). In the past two years, presumably GM's leaders decided that making hideously extravagant Super Bowl media buys would be in bad taste while the company was actively going into and getting out of the largest bankruptcy in U.S. business history. So, "Super Bowl" was not a line item on the GM budget in 2009 or 2010.
Apparently $15 million for 2 1/2 minutes of attention was not in bad taste in 2011, though, in somebody's opinion. "Somebody" is probably not the taxpayers who can't find a full-time job or pay their mortgage while their tax dollars are still supporting GM's daily operations. GM didn't ask those somebodies for their opinion about GM's Super Bowl advertising budget on the GM Facebook wall before making the big advertising buy.
(Side note to the retail industry.... you do realize that when you bribe people to "like" you, it doesn't necessarily mean that they like you, right?)
As for the GM commercials themselves... Did anybody else find it odd that one commercial featured seniors who are too old to drive and another commercial featured a car dealership from several decades ago? GM's Super Bowl XLV commercials seem to demonstrate that GM still has a fundamental misunderstanding about who their customer base is and what that customer base wants. Just because you get bailed out of a mess, doesn't mean that the choices that created the mess in the first place automatically disappear too. I'm just saying.
While nine auto companies fought for the attention of the Super Bowl audience, two of the "Forbes Best Car Brands" chose not to play the Super Bowl advertising game at all in 2011 - Toyota (TM), and Lexus (Honda (HMC) and Volvo did some regional advertising.) The biggest consequences may be to Lexus, whose recent sales took a double-digit drop, while rival Super Bowl advertisers BMW and Mercedes-Benz have been riding on a double-digit rise. With its Super Bowl absence, Lexus may lose some of its cool points to the Germans, along with its 11-year luxury car sales leader crown.
- $10 billion is the amount of Super Bowl related consumer spending that was predicted by the National Retail Federation (NRF)
- 1.25 billion chicken wing portions were expected to be consumed, according to the National Chicken Council.
- Super Bowl wagers worldwide were estimated to be between $1 billion and $10 billion.
- 70 billion is the estimated number of calories consumed by Super Bowl chip eaters.
- BMW invested $1 billion in the U.S. in order to make the "built in America" cars that it advertised during Super Bowl XLV.
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