A 30-second Super Bowl LVI ad reportedly costs $6.5 million in air time. As the Bengals and Rams face off on Super Bowl Sunday in front of more than 100 million viewers, this might seem like a great opportunity. Or, you could stretch a marketing budget that’s the same as the price of a Super Bowl ad over the next 25 years and have a very robust, fully integrated campaign!
Yes! I said 25 years of marketing.
To put $6.5 million/30 seconds in perspective, it would cost a fraction of that ($2.5 million/minute) to fly into space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket. Or with a $6.5 million budget, you could buy top-of-the-line Tesla Roadsters for yourself and about 30 of your colleagues.
At a hefty budget of $260,000 per year, a $6.5 million marketing budget could get you 25 years of strategic and professionally executed publicity, digital marketing, digital advertising, content creation, ecommerce marketing on such platforms as Amazon, influencer marketing and graphic design services.
Of course, that’s calculated using today’s dollars, and in reality our clients have a wide range of budgets. The point is, which would you rather have: 30 seconds of exposure or 25 years of steady, targeted exposure across all promotional platforms?
Your sad ROI even if you could afford a Super Bowl ad
Super Bowl ads are for cash cow brands that don’t need to tell their product’s story. Everyone knows it. They simply need to figuratively tap people on the shoulder and remind them to buy.
Wouldn’t it be nice if your product was so well known, that’s all you had to do? Instead, you need to do the work that every cash cow brand had to do when they were introduced. You need to find wide promotional channels that allow you the time and space to teach and persuade people to buy. Places where you can tell your story, not a clever punchline.
Publicity is a better marketing foundation
If you’re selling to the public, mass marketing is always good. The more people that hear your story, the better. So when you market, look for inexpensive ways to get in front of the masses.
One reason Super Bowl ads cost so much is it’s a rare occasion when people tune into ads rather than tune them out. Publicity is a low-cost way to tell your story to the masses when they’re willing to listen. Publicity is a marketer’s dream because it’s cheap and it tells a story to the masses when they are listening.
Our Pay Per Interview® pricing model guarantees media coverage for your money. We’ve been charging per story for nearly 35 years, and clients love it.
If you’re like most companies, you earned a mediocre amount of media attention in 2021. Do something different this year by using publicity to share your product’s story with the masses. Our publicists would love to contact the media on your behalf.
Call us at 952-697-5269 or use this form to get a quick assessment of how interested the media would be in your story and how much it would cost to work with us. Unlike Super Bowl ads, it doesn’t cost anything to see what we think.
For more great marketing advice, check out The CEO’s Guide to Marketing!”
