Marketing Infographic of the Week: TV Ads Not Believable
Super Bowl XLVII is in the NFL history books, but the effectiveness of the ads, which cost nearly $4 million for 30 seconds, remains unclear.
Sure, we know an average of 108.4 million people watched the Super Bowl this year, the third-largest audience for a television event on record, according to CBS. But we don't know how many eyeballs saw each ad, much less how many believed the ads or were inspired to buy the products Madison Avenue was selling.
The infographic below, from Lab42, provides some interesting data points about advertising in general, including the survey finding that 76% of people think advertising is exaggerated.
Read beyond the infographic for more analysis on ads and if they really ad up.
Analysis
Looking ahead, if people don't believe TV ads are true, and are increasingly tuning them out, that has huge implications for brands and sports leagues, such as the NFL.
Granted, people pay way more attention to ads during the Super Bowl than they do for other games. I, for one, watched most of the Super Bowl ads but mute commercials for most games when watching live.
I skip through ads altogether when I have recorded a game on my DVR, and I'm not alone, a troubling trend for TV advertisers.
If you are a big sports fan as I am, you might even use a TV remote with a button that fast forwards 30 seconds, the average time to huddle and get a play off, meaning you can not only skip the ads but much of the game between plays, reducing the amount of time it takes to watch an entire game.
The point is this: the era of interruption communication ("and now a word from our sponsor") is giving way to an era of on-demand communication (think Google searches). Technology and small business are driving this change.
This new, Web-based strategy goes by several names -- including "inbound marketing," "content marketing" and "brand journalism." Unlike $4 million TV ads, its effectiveness (ROI) usually can be measured because we can track the actions of online consumers after using on-demand content.
Assist Communications Owner Mark O'Keefe is a six-time Pulitzer Prize nominee whose websites have been honored three times by the Webby Awards.