Who is paying $3 million for Super Bowl ads this year?
According to Reuters through Wall Street Journal, ads for Super Bowl XLIII start at $3 million for 30 seconds, the highest starting price for Super Bowl ads ever. NBC claims most of their ads have sold, despite the tough economy.
Super Bowl regulars like FedEx and GM have bowed out, but Pepsi, Coke and Anheuser-Busch remain in the fray. You can expect other Super Bowl splashers, like Doritos, will probably be in the mix, too.
CNN mentions that most of the advertisers purchased their ads as long ago as September, when things were only kinda-bad when compared to now.
Could you imagine if companies like Ford, Chevrolet, or WaMu are even remotely mentioned in any Super Bowl ads? Any corporation that’s even thinking about bailout money is, hopefully, as far away from a Super Bowl ad as possible.
This, from CNN:
“General Motors, the official Super Bowl sponsor, used an animated, 60-second spot during last year’s game to unveil its GMC Yukon Hybrid. But the automaker will not be airing a commercial this year. GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato said the company made that decision back in September.
“It just wasn’t a good enough return on the investment for that, because we didn’t have a major vehicle launch that aligned with the timing of the Super Bowl,” said Cusinato. “Then we went to Congress, and the economy got worse and we started scaling back a lot of other sponsorships.”
When auto executives went hat in hand to Congress last December, GM was strongly advised not to run a Super Bowl ad this year.”
Good thing GM is considering the important issues, like launch strategy, when deciding how to best spend our money.
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