A total of six count 'em six new advertisers will be coming off the bench to join the Super Bowl lineup this year. That's the most since 19 dotcom advertisers debuted in the 2000 Super Bowl. Which, in turn, was the most since the very first Super Bowl, called the NFL Championship when it aired in 1967, when all the advertisers were new to the game.
Except for GoDaddy, most of the dotcom rookies of 12 years ago are ancient history. How many of this year's newbies will share their fate? It will probably come down to how good a fit the placement and the message are with the Super Bowl audience.
Logical legacies
Super Bowl buys make lots of sense for brands whose sister products have already made their mark there. Newcomer Acura's sister brand Honda has been a successful Super Bowl advertiser for years, as has rookie Lexus's corporate sibling Toyota.
Automotive advertising is a good fit. So if they do good spots, they should do well.
Sorta logical connection
The H&M retail chain is advertising to launch its new David Beckham Bodywear underwear. I say, chaps, has no one told you that on this side of the Pond, we Yanks have a different kind of football?
Semi-logical timing
2nd Story Software is basing its ad buy for TAXAct tax-return software on the assumption that February 5 isn't all that far from April 15, is it? Or is it, when you consider how many people don't start even thinking about income taxes until the W2s come in by the end-of-February deadline?
Timing also figures into Century 21's media planning. "The Super Bowl comes just before the spring selling season," says chief marketing officer Beverly Thorne. If you figure that Spring officially starts March 21, that's a bit less of a stretch than April 21.
But then there's this "logic": To capture Super Bowl viewers' attention and interest, their third-quarter commercial will be built around celebrities -- Donald Trump, Deion Sanders and Apollo Ohno -- to make the point that Century 21agents are "Smarter. Bolder. Faster." Celebrity commercials may be bolder and faster, but audience research shows they're also dumber. In Ace Metrix testing, non-celebrity commercials scored an average of 8% above category norms for attention and interest, while celebrity commercials averaged 1.4% below norm. That's a 9.4% spread.
There's also the fact that the primary home-buying decision makers are female heads of households, and while Super Bowl audiences are now about 50/50 male/female, it's hard to imagine all that many women relating to the Donald and a pair of jocks.
Illogic?
Dannon yogurt will be pushing its Oikos Greek yogurt with a :30 in the third quarter, with actor John Stamos, who played Jesse Katsopolis on "Full House," as their pitchman. Maybe they had that 50% female audience (55 million plus, based on last year's record viewership) in mind. Maybe they blanked on those statistics about celebrity ineffectiveness. Maybe they think Greek yogurt goes as great with the Super Bowl as beer and pizza.
But spending all that money just to emphasize the Greekness of their product sounds like a bankrupt creative strategy -- as bankrupt as the country its style of yogurt comes from.
Who's new locally?
While networks (NBC this year) boast openly about who's buying Super Bowl ad time, local affiliates, like Richmond's Channel 12, tend to be secretive. So we won't know until the game itself which new advertisiers bought time on local Richmond adjacencies, much less which ones are producing new Super Bowl commercials.
We can guess one thing, though: A lot of personal-injury lawyers will be there with them.
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