Big-time businesses are paying an average of $4 million to spend 30 seconds in your home during today’s Super Bowl. The advertisers know who they’ll find in front of the screens: a huge, attentive crowd of consumers.
In this era of ads that tap social media to slice and dice potential customers into every imaginable demographic niche, the spending on mass-audience Super Bowl ads shows us the power of football to momentarily unify our fractured culture. Sure, not everyone loves the game of football. Still, enough pay attention to make the sport’s biggest day one of our society’s last common bonds among people of all ages, genders, races, and incomes.
For advertisers, then, the Super Bowl is the big stage for selling products with broad appeal — cars, beer, and packaged foods. But we all know the advertising moment has become much more than that. Ever since then-upstart Apple introduced its Macintosh computer with a single stunning ad that consumed much of its advertising budget, Super Bowl ad placements have become “a celebration of advertising,” in the words Shane Wolfsmith, director of account services at AHA!, a Vancouver strategic communications firm. Consumer product marketers push the limits of creativity and, in some cases, taste. And most years, a technology company follows in Apple’s giant footsteps to pitch the latest wonder product or shape their public image.
Wolfsmith, who spent 15 years in the advertising industry, sees the creative burst of Super Bowl commercials as a welcome contrast to what he sees as an overall decline in advertising imagination. The advertisements have become a separate, almost equal, cultural moment.
