On February 5 we discussed marketing and football with GRF Shiv. The Super Bowl brings big bucks. With over 110 million viewers, the average cost of a 30 second commercial is around $5 million. This year the event netted Fox about $500 million: http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-gets-500-million-from-super-bowl-2017-2

Commercials used to be a tad less expensive. According to that same article, a 30 second ad in the first super bowl would have cost you a little under $40,000. The cost was only $4 million about five years ago, which tells us that it has been increasing pretty considerably year over year.

As a lifelong New England Patriots hater and a temporary Atlanta Falcons fan, the game was a wild ride. The Falcons led 28-3 halfway through the third quarter, which was completely overrided by the Patriots to my stunning amazement. This game set the record for the biggest deficit over-come in a Super Bowl, but not the biggest comeback in general. That honor goes to “The Comeback” in 1993, which had the Buffalo Bills recover from a 32 point deficit to win 41-38 against the Houston Oilers: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/04/sports/pro-football-bills-eagles-turn-mountains-into-molehill-buffalo-erases-32-point.html

I was never much of a sports fan. Nor was my family or friends. I didn’t grow up watching the super bowl, and I don’t particularly have a favorite team.

Despite all of that, the commercials for the Super Bowl have transcended the sport. I can still remember a few of them off the top of my head. Even though the popularity of the NFL has drastically declined, the hype over Super Bowl commercials is still tangible every time a Super Bowl rolls around.

And yet, despite the seeming importance of these commercials, one has to wonder if the companies even get their money’s worth from each one. A thirty second segment surely wouldn’t sell very much product, yet, companies desperately vie to grab each time slot, paying up to five million for precious air time. It is a risky gamble, and most Super Bowl commercials are forgettable and have already been long forgotten.

As the internet becomes more and more widespread, entertainment surely will speed up. The maximum allowed commercial time on Youtube is thirty seconds, and most people would want to skip through even those paltry thirty seconds of advertisement. Ads would have to become more interesting, more relevant, or simply more “out there” in order to seize the increasingly short attention span of those who entertain themselves on the internet.

Perhaps companies will have to resort to unconventional measures. Memes– widespread internet jokes– have often featured popular commercial products, such as 7up or Doritos. The cost of making a meme is nearly nonexistent, but once a meme is created, it rages across social media like a wildfire, potentially spreading a brand name faster than any commercial ever could. Perhaps, one day, memes will become the ideal way to advertise a product?

It sounds ridiculous, I know… but spending five million dollars for thirty seconds on a slowly hemorrhaging sports event also sounds ridiculous to me.

Each Year, a significant portion of the american populace gather in front of their televisions to watch the biggest sporting event of the year, the Super Bowl. this year, the New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons will play for the glory of raising the Lombardi Trophy. Off the field, a large commercial onslaught occurs as, corporations and businesses all battle for one of the coveted commercial spots that air between the plays. The NFL has lost a large amount of its appeal for me over the years. The NFL seems very artificial and restrained to me; in fact, I have switched to college football as my primary source of sports entertainment because of the NFL has been going. With Massively commercialized games to rampant off the field issues that some of the athletes get themselves into, I’ve looked elsewhere for entertainment. Hopefully some changes will be made by the time Super Bowl 52 comes around.

I was born a Jets fan. My dad was a Jets fan. His dad was a Jets fan. That being said, I KNOW what it means to lose. We do it pretty well (but hey at least we’re not the Browns).  But one thing about being a Jets fan is the inherent hatred we have for Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and the Patriots. Now I went into this playoff series knowing full well the Pats would make it to the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a question. I decided to start watching NFC games to determine which team I had to rally behind in hope to defeat the Patriots. For the longest time I believed Dallas would take it home, as they rightfully deserved a championship this season. When they lost to Green Bay, it was back to being up in the air.  Then when I heard the Falcons would face the Pats, I admittedly thought Matt Ryan wouldn’t be able to pull out the W.

Watching the Falcons dominate the first half was actually a thrilling surprise, especially getting to see my roommate’s (a Pats fan) reaction to the game.  Then Brady happened. As always that guy finds a way to win. Regardless of the outcome, the Super Bowl this year was one exciting game to watch. And one thing I learned this week is just how sad it is that people at this school don’t appreciate one of the biggest sports events of the year. People not only do not watch the Super Bowl, but they also don’t see any reason to. If not only to watch the commercials, I believe the Super Bowl is one of those events that people should at least watch once. It is the culmination of hard work and two triumphant teams battling it out for the championship. I hope that in years to come, the current trend of NFL viewers decreasing will change and people will come to realize how beautiful a sport football is.

Leading up to the Super Bowl, I had been seriously worried about the prospect of a Patriots win. While they had a terrific run with some blowout season victories, the likelihood of the Patriots offense to capitalize against the stolid Atlanta defense seemed impossible. This theory seemed to be corroborated at halftime and sealed even more with the Falcons first touchdown in the second half. As a Pats fan, this was deeply troubling.  However, Chris Hogan, Danny Amendola, and Julian Edelman’s powerful receiving skills, accenting Tom Brady’s fantastic arm won the day. 

This win solidifies Tom Brady as the best QB ever! He also shares my name (this is primarily why I like him). He is he best QB there is when he has time, and once the offensive line started defending him properly he crushed the defense!

Last week I watched the Super Bowl in the Rose Main Dining Room. The actual football game was incredible, one of the best in history because of the Patriots overcoming a 25-point deficit, and going on to win it in overtime. My first thought when I realized that this was the only Super Bowl to go to overtime was how incredible that really was. Given that there have been 51 Super Bowls, it seems incredible that only this one has gone to overtime. During the regular season, the percentage of games that go to overtime is greater than ~2%.

In addition to the crazy game, we got to see a lot of very expensive ads. I did a quick look up, and the 30-second spots cost on average $5 million. However, it did not seem like the quality of ads was as good as in previous years, which could be the result of cable television slowly dying in popularity. A few of the ads seemed to be direct political statements against some of our President’s policies, and that led me to think again about where we stand as a nation.

Last week I bore witness to America’s greatest sporting event, the annual Super Bowl. It lived up to the sporting hype, offering a spectacle that kept me glued to the screen. Yet as I watched, I found myself dwelling more on the business side of the sport rather its athletic aspect. The conversation before the big occasion focused on the financial side of football: the declining viewership of the NFL over the past year and the cost and value of Super Bowl commercials. As I watched the Patriots return from the abyss to record another championship, I wondered if my belief in the underdog was wishful thinking for a time when money did not breed success. Is it truly a surprise that the league second-most valuable franchise defeated its 19th; that the team with four previous Super Bowls defeated the team with none?

I wanted the Patriots to win, but I also wanted to see a post-game interview where Bill Belichick’s team didn’t win the Super Bowl, mainly just to see his reaction.  Those are mutually exclusive events, so I opted more for the first outcome.  The game was filled with ups and downs, but mainly downs for the first two and a half quarters.  When the Patriots first scored a touchdown, I wasn’t exactly excited because 19 points still seemed like a long ways to go.  But then they scored again.  I was still doubtful, but then another touchdown came in.  It was getting to be crunch time in the fourth quarter, and by that point every play seemed to have me about out of my chair and clapping my hands.

I’m from Arizona, yet after definitively choosing my preferred team and seeing them comeback from such a large deficit, I felt like a Boston native, at least for a little while.  There’s some driving force behind “your” team winning a game, especially a championship that determines whether the team’s season will end in fruition or futility.

At the talk we had before the game, our conversation centered around advertisements and declining Super Bowl viewership.  A particular theory we came up with is that less people are watching because there are automatic score and play updates you can download on your cell phone.  After finishing the entire game, though, I thought of how much of a shame it would be to experience that win through text.  I guess I took a small slice of the victory from that team.  That slice seemed to blow up when I saw the excitement from the players, New England Natives, and anybody cheering on TV and around me in the Rose Dining Room.  For that night, this game with a binary outcome of win or lose put me in camaraderie with a bunch of other people whom I didn’t really know.  That seems to be the spirit of Super Bowl Sunday.

As someone who doesn’t watch football, and barely understands it, I typically end up watching the game more for the advertisements than anything else. This year in particular I found that the Super Bowl provided a platform for political messages, and thus proved to be a very potent indicator of the current American sociopolitical climate. In this way, an event as essentially American as the Super Bowl can serve as a window into the ethos of our society.

Prior to the start of the game, there was a discussion about the cost of advertisements and general decline in viewership of the Super Bowl in recent years. In terms of viewership, it seems quite plausible that the progression of modern society has played a role in decreasing attention spans and encouraging individuals to check scores or video highlights the day after rather than watching the game real time. This also speaks to the declining social component of American life, as technology renders many forms of face to face interactions unnecessary and often discourages social gatherings. On the topic of advertisements, those found during the Super Bowl are often extravagant, and in past years have relied more on shock value than entertainment. This year, however, I found the sheer volume of political messages astounding. As a result of the last election, politics has come to the center of American media in a way it hasn’t for many years. This was incredibly visible in these advertisements, as even private companies feel both a. strongly enough about the current political situation to present an opinion, and b. that presenting this opinion is still relevant and accessible to the average viewer. Specifically, advertisements such as those for Budweiser, Coca Cola, and 84 Lumber presented potent imagery in response to the current immigration controversy. While this essentially differs from the expectation of the Super Bowl as a purely social and entertainment-oriented event, it is evident that this American tradition is just as much at the mercy of the current political atmosphere as anything else. In fact, it seems quite appropriate that these messages of unity were presented using the platform of an event which at its core represents both camaraderie and Americanism.

This past Sunday I attended the “Football, Marketing, and Money” Rose scholars event to watch the super bowl and analyze the advertisements.  I came into the event in anticipation of a great football game between two great teams that would be complimented with some great advertisement commercials.  However, while the game was great, the ads fell short in my opinion.  In fact, I personally think that the ads have been on the decline the last few years in terms of recall from viewers.

In other words, the ads don’t seem to be memorable as of late.  Statistics from the recall rate of viewers of these adds were just 29-39% depending on the add.  As a company, I think a successful recall rate would be over 50%.  At the same time, the cost per ad for just 30 seconds has been on a steady rise.  Back in 2002, the cost for such an add was $2.3 million.  Flash forward 15 years, commercials of just 30 seconds cost a company $5 million.

I believe that such an investment is important for many companies due to the strong viewership of the Super Bowl.  However, I think these same companies need to spend more time on their marketing capabilities in order to make their commercials more memorable and thus lead to more commerce in their company.  Also being from the Atlanta area, I was a little sad to see the hometown lose; however, there’s nothing you can do when the clutch Patriots do what they did so late in the game.

Last Sunday I attended a discussion about the Super bowl, which made me think about the marketing and advertising of the Super bowl.  Most international students understand the important role that sports play in American culture. Since, more often than not every country has a sport that majority of the country’s population follows and identifies with. Therefore, the importance of the football in American culture is similar to all other nations in the world. The Super bowl is the most significant football event of the year. However, something that baffles many international students including myself is the amount of money a super bowl advertisement is worth. Is it really worth spending 5 million (or more) on a 30 second spot?

The super bowl reaches an audience of approximately 110 million viewers. The biggest cinematic blockbuster from 2016, Rogue One, only sold about 55 million tickets. In terms of cultural reach, football’s championship game is twice the size of the biggest blockbuster. Therefore, maybe it is worth it to spend $5 million on a 30 second spot. However, this does not benefit all companies that advertise during the super bowl. Personally, I would argue that new companies and products that people haven’t heard of before would get the most return on the $5 million dollar investment, because millions of people are hearing about them for the first time.

However, if a reputed company uses the Super bowl to advertise their current products and services this would not provide them a good return on their investment since millions of people watching the Super bowl have already heard and seen their brand promotions before. Thus, the $ 5 million dollar investment would not benefit the firms that already have a certain reputation and stature.

The Super bowl’s remarkable reach definitely benefits the new companies and products that are advertising for the first time since it allows you to reach such a large proportion of America’s population. Yet for established brands and firms the Super bowl is not worth spending $5 million dollars on in the long run. Therefore, it is only worth spending $5 million dollars if you’re a company that’s never been heard of before, if you’re an established brand it is not worth spending $5 million.

On Feb. 5, I attended “Football, Marketing, and Money.” The group conversation was particularly insightful for me personally, as I don’t follow football. So, although I knew about Fantasy Football, I didn’t realize how big the business actually is. Fantasy Football was brought up as a possible contributing factor in the decline of football viewership. Someone made a very interesting point about how maybe another reason viewership is declining is because culture is changing – the communal aspect, particularly. As a result, in general, maybe  people aren’t really gathering in big groups anymore, as humans tend to seem more isolated (physically) because of technology.

Personally, I don’t watch football because I never grew up around it. So, as viewership continues to decline, I wonder how that will impact the future growth of the NFL. Additionally, it’s going to be interesting to see how the NFL combats the issue of declining viewership through marketing. Because, in the long run, if revenue decreases, salary of players may decrease, possibly influencing the talent that comes in, as some athletes may be turned off by football and pursue other sports.