When you watch the Super Bowl on February 7, you’ll see commercials from a well-known national beer brand. You’ll also see commercials from their leading competitor. But much of the rest of the country won’t.
National sponsors, local buys
You see, in addition to national commercial time, the network (this year, CBS) also allocates a certain number of game-time minutes to local affiliates (in Richmond, Channel 6) to sell. While local sponsors buy many of these availablilites, national brands also snap them up – sometimes for traditional reasons and sometimes for new, recession-related, ones.
Large regional advertisers, for example, have historically bought Super Bowl time locally, to match their actual distribution geography and avoid wasting advertising dollars on markets where they don’t do business. But the recession has brought advertisers of truly national scope into the game for entirely different reasons.
Recession triage
Even with CBS’s this-year-only-17-percent-off January sale on air time, many national advertisers are still finding the $2.95 million for 30 seconds bargain rate no bargain in a deep recession. So they’re performing triage. They’re sorting out markets where they’ll do well without Super Bowl advertising, markets where they’re doing so poorly that Super Bowl advertising won’t help, and markets where being on the Super Bowl can make a difference – and making spot buys of that local time to make a difference in that last group of markets, at much lower total media outlay than the national rates.
So will people throughout America be seeing that big-brand commercial you’re watching? Or will they be blacked out? Only CBS and Channel 6 know for sure.
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