The skyrocketing price of Super Bowl ads, which doubled in price in the last decade to $5 million for a 30-second spot this year, again begs the question: is it worth the cost?
That’s the question posed this week in an announcement from Peel, maker of a leading smart remote.
Based on new data released from Peel, one factor ad buyers might want to consider when evaluating the risk-reward is, when is their ad going to air?
Peel reviewed tune-out data from NFL playoff games and Super Bowls for the last two seasons and found the number of viewers watching the game declines steadily throughout the event. On average, excluding the first 5 minutes of a game, the audience in the fourth quarter is 17% smaller on average than at the start of a game. With 115 million expected to tune into Super Bowl 50, a drop in viewership of just 1% equates to a loss of a million viewers. And, as might be expected, games where the point differential is large face greater defections.
As an example cited in Peel’s announcement, in this year’s NFL Wild Card games, 19% tuned out of the 30-0 Kansas City-Houston rout versus 14% for Green Bay vs Washington, where the teams were separated by 6-points going into a high-scoring 4th quarter.
On average, for all 17 NFL post-season games analyzed by Peel, games which ended in a final score of less than one-touchdown’s difference resulted in an average of 4% more viewers remaining tuned-in versus games with two touchdowns or more separating the teams. In Super Bowl terms, that’s a difference of 5 million viewers.
“It is widely known that networks offer discounts for multiple ad buys during major sporting events, but evidence seems to indicate that there is little or no consideration given to when an ad appears during the Super Bowl,” the company says. “UCool, a Silicon Valley mobile games startup announced last year that it paid $2.25 million for its 15-second fourth quarter ad in the 2015 Super Bowl, which was not discounted from the $4.5 million rate charged by CBS for 30-second ads early in the game. CBS has announced that it raised its 30-second rate to $5 million for this year’s Super Bowl.”
