Are Super Bowl ads worth it?
From the depths of Reddit, user McWitt questions what the five-million dollars in ad money could have been used for.
The aptly named Reddit user’s post made it to the front page of Reddit on Monday following the Super Bowl.
“Colgate had a 5 million dollar commercial to tell me to turn my faucet off to save water for the needy. When that 5 million could buy 74,671,445 bottles of water and they could tell me how to brush my teeth on their box.” – McWitt on Reddit.
It seems so counterproductive to the effort of saving water. As other users pointed out, the instructions are written right on the box.
What if the whole ad wasn’t to get you to care at all? What if the ad was about making you think that Colgate cares about those in need who don’t have enough water? This might be a cynical thought, but it answers the five million dollar question.
CNN reported that 112.2 million viewers watched the Super Bowl; not a record amount, but more than enough to make throwing a logo around worth it.
Ads, in nature, are manipulative, but what Colgate has done seemingly goes beyond that. They have exploited a narrative about children in need around the globe to try and get you to associate that caring sense as one of their brand values. One free tweet from Colgate that said, “We were going to get a Super Bowl ad but donated the five million dollars to projects that help get water for others,” could have been the answer. They could have spent one million on Flint, Michigan and another four million abroad. Link this tweet to some info graphics and project video, and voila—you’ve got a campaign that will garner enough media attention that would easily equal five million dollars, and they would have tangibly helped thousands of people in the process.
The only other factor I can think of that would prevent them from doing something similar to this is the allure of Super Bowl advertisement acclaim. It’s possible that Colgate’s parent company, Colgate-Palmolive, hired out for this ad, meaning that they went to a mega advertisement company that won a pitch contest to get the contract.
On paper this idea looks great. It matches brand values to a strong cause, but maybe by hiring out, they have let a room full of marketers and creatives achieve their dream too soon. This same problem could apply to an in-house team, but hopefully the allure of Super Bowl-ness would be less drawing. It is a hope for many creatives to have their work displayed at the Super Bowl. The perceived and historical strength of having a good ad at the event would be hard to resist for anyone in the industry. The most famousSuper Bowl ads still ring true today (Coke anyone?), while the bad or uninteresting ones quickly fall into obscurity. That’s the gamble Colgate-Palmolive made, and in a year or two no one will be using this as an example of great advertising in Marketing 101.