Last night at dinner, I found it amusing that the only advertisements I had heard about for the upcoming Super Bowl were related to mayonnaise and avocados from Mexico. In fact, I will be missing the entire event this year because I'll be on a flight to Sweden. I have no concerns about balancing servers to handle traffic spikes, no worries about MySQL queries locking up, no checklists to track when I’m allowed to publish which ads—just no stress at all.
"It's such a relief," I said to my husband. "It's such a huge workload; people have no idea what goes into it." He replied, "To be fair, you never told anyone that you literally run the whole thing."
"I did too!" I retorted.
"No, you may think you have," he continued, "but it was probably more of a Swedish passive-aggressive quip. People really didn’t understand that you were the server administrator, the programmer, and the editor-in-chief all at once. Nobody knew that Adland was run by one single person."
I've mentioned this countless times and even advertised my willingness to sell it for years, but perhaps I was too busy running Adland for anyone to notice. Regardless, I can now confidently say that Super Bowl ads are a complete waste of a brand's time.
Think about it. What Super Bowl ads do you remember from last year—without consulting a cheat sheet? How about from the last five years? Can you name your top ten Super Bowl ads from the past decade? If you find it difficult to recall any without searching online, you're not alone. Even I have trouble recalling any ads from last year. It's all a blur to me.
Nowadays, Super Bowl ads are promoted weeks in advance of the game. The "teaser" ad has been replaced by the 90-second version, which is essentially the Super Bowl ad, just not the one that will actually air during the event. The "pregame" hype is louder than the commercial during the game, which airs during the big flush.
The media, 30 seconds during the big game, costs millions of dollars and this price goes up every year. Then the brand pours even more money into production, and celebrities, and hot-shot directors. This ad now becomes "the ad with Meg Ryan", or "the ad with Ben Affleck", and if your celebrity stars in more than one superbowl ad like Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart or Missy Elliot who seems to make a constant cameo, well your brand is SOOL in being remembered. Nobody will recall your brand over the celebrity.
Now imagine, just imagine, if your brand had spent all of these millions of dollars on aggressive PR, a strategic media spend, and one consistent branding idea on several well executed, well directed commercials over the span of an entire year. I could bet you a superbowl ad budget that would give your brand better sales in the end.
The superbowl ads are too often middle-of-the-road, unfunny, unsurprising, unmoving bland and boring these days, they all blend into one another. A good ad is a good ad, no matter when it airs. A bad ad is a bad ad, no matter what celebrity and movie-reference it borrows from.
For the first time in 28 years I'll be seeing this as an outsider, as the person who has ignored the press releases in my inbox (an auto-reply is handling that right now), and I will see what the regular consumer sees. It'll be interesting to see if I'll recall any superbowl ads at all.