I’m way behind in writing about the movie commercials that aired during last Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIII. Like Tom, I actually spent the evening watching (most) of the game and for the first time since 2006 didn’t feel the need to tie myself to a laptop to write about the spots as soon as they aired.
(Let me digress for a moment and state for the record my favorite spot of the game was the Alec Baldwin-starring commercial for Hulu.com. Not only was it funny but it presented a strong call to action to actually use the product. It was original, interesting and it stuck with me for a long while, prompting many rewatchings via, of course, Hulu. It also helped that the company put up a post on their blog that continued the spot’s narrative, which alone had me laughing out loud.)
Anyway, all told 11 movies were promoted during the game, making “Movies” the top advertiser category for this Super Bowl, outpacing beer and cars.
Paramount:
- Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
- GI Joe: Rise of Cobra
- Star Trek
Dreamworks:
- Monsters Vs. Aliens
Sony Pictures:
- Angels and Demons
- Year One
Univeral:
- Land of the Lost
- Fast and Furious
- Duplicity
Disney/Pixar
- Race to Witch Mountain
- Up
The movie commercials that aired wound up being among the most buzzed about online, even if they failed to make the grade on measurements such as USA Today’s AdMeter poll.
According to data from TNS Cymfony the spot for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen created the most online buzz, coming in with seven times the average amount of discussion of the Super Bowl ads as a whole.
Also in the top five of this ranking were two of Paramount’s other advertised movies, Star Trek (#2) and G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (#4).
The Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen spot also appeared on TiVo’s list of the game’s most replayed commercials. (Viewers were probably looking for actual robots in the spot…but I’ll save that for my later commentary.)
The reasons for movie commercials coming in so high on this chart while not appearing on another may be easy to explain. It could be as simple as noting the fact that there are numerous movie news blogs that all covered the spots, while blogs that cover the financial industry might not have dedicated a lot of space to analyzing the e*trade commercials.
The disconnect between the “online buzz” chart and the USAT AdMeter poll is also pretty easy to explain: That survey traditionally measures spots that were deemed “creative” or otherwise unusual by the audience and those words aren’t usually used to describe movie trailers, which are subsets of the movie itself and not original creations.
So while there’s some opinion out there that the studios wasted the $3 million/spot price tag (I don’t believe for an instant that any of the studios actually paid that price) it’s important to remember that the additional cost associated with it is, for studios, minimal. Unlike an advertiser like Pepsi they didn’t have to shell out millions of additional dollars for the creation of the commercial – it’s just a little bit of editing.
It is fair to say that these are the movies that would have done well at the box-office even without an expensive ad buy. But it’s not like studios are actually going to use a huge platform like the Super Bowl to promote art-house or niche flicks, and a commercial in the game can have positive effects on reinforcing a behavior, even if it’s not going to lead to a whole lot of converts.
One poll the movie ads did not fare well at all on is Reprise Media’s annual scorecard of how the spots were tied to search campaigns. The list of brands that “fumbled” the tying of a TV spot with prompting online visiting by including a URL or taking advantage of search through the purchase of paid keyword ads is largely dominated by movie titles.
I’ll be back, probably tomorrow, with my opinions of the spots themselves. In the meantime you can vote for your favorite at Spout.
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