Do Those Super Bowl Commercials Increase Sales?

Companies will spend an enormous amount of money on Super Bowl commercials during Sunday's big game.  Sporting News reported that companies will spend an average of $7 million for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial.  Of course, you might be wondering:  How much of an impact do those commercials have on subsequent purchases?  I dug through some research on the topic, and I found one particularly interesting paper by Wesley R. Hartmann and Daniel Klapper.  They published their research in Marketing Science several years ago.  

Hartmann and Klapper examined how commercials impacted sales after the Super Bowl.  They found a positive relationship between the advertising and product purchases during a subsequent sporting event.   Specifically, they examined how Super Bowl ads impacted consumption of products such as beer during the March Madness college basketball tournament, which takes place about 5-6 weeks after the Super Bowl.  Here is their summary of the findings from the research: 

We measure the effect of ad viewership on post–Super Bowl sales. Without an obvious horizon for the effects, we measure the effect separately for each week following the game. While the first few weeks appear to follow a typical decay pattern, the advertising effects show resurgence in weeks when shoppers make purchases to consume during subsequent major sports broadcasts. This pattern suggests the hypothesis that Super Bowl advertising may build a complementarity with sports viewership more broadly.  To test this, we collected market-week-level data on viewership of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament and interacted it with the Super Bowl ad exposures. We found that purchases for consumption during viewership of the NCAA tournament were augmented if the brand’s Super Bowl ad viewership was high.

Behavioral Science & Effective Super Bowl Commercials

Great Super Bowl commercials engage us with wonderful stories and some humor as well.  Is there more to it than that though?  Could we use cognitive science to understand why some ads have a bigger impact than others?  Ad Age magazine sat down with Carey Morewedge, associate professor of marketing at Boston University.  Professor Morewedge explained how certain principles from the research on cognitive biases help us explain the power of certain very memorable commercials.  First, Morewedge points to the legendary "1984" ad from Apple as well as last year's BMW Super Bowl commercial.  In both cases, the representativeness heuristic is at work.   Ad Age's Michele Fabrizi explains: 

"Analogies transfer positive associations with a good, old idea to the new idea. In scenes evoking the well-known novel "1984," the hammer-wielding young heroine smashing the existing norm heralds the societal sea change promised by the introduction of Apple's Macintosh.  We see the same principle effectively used again -- albeit with ironic humor -- in last year's BMW "New Fangled Idea" (No. 23 on Ad Age's list). Here a look back at Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel's failure to initially recognize the massive future impact of the internet is juxtaposed against their confused first response to an electric car."

Morewedge also points to the principle of loss framing as a mechanism by some commercials have a powerful impact on us.   Fabrizi explains: "Loss framing offers an approach to elevate the importance of a brand's benefits. This principle tells us that the pain of losing a thing we own is about twice as powerful as the pleasure we would feel acquiring it." FedEx ran an ad called "We Apologize" that took advantage of loss framing. It didn't focus on the benefits of FedEx's timely service. Instead, it showcased (with humor) the dangers of bad service and delayed deliveries. 

 

Great Commercial: Using Cliches to Your Advantage

Fast Company's Jeff Beer has a short piece about a new commercial from Bobble, maker of reusable water bottles.  The advertisement features a fake brand (Once), and it ridicules those who drink bottled water from disposable plastic bottles.  Beer writes,

If you watch enough advertising aimed at anyone aged 14 to 30, certain patterns of tone, image, and style emerge. Young people, just livin' the good life, embracing the moment, seizing the day and all that. To draw attention to the huge amount of waste created by single-use plastic water bottles, reusable bottle brand Bobble has tapped all these well-tread commercial cliches to reach the exact same audience.

The advertisement is fascinating precisely because it highlights another side to these cliches about how millennials should live their lives.   Moreover, as the advertising agency managing director, James Townsend noted, "It's more effective to make something look uncool than it is to say it's bad for you."