That leads to the second irony of the Super Bowl, which is that the game is most valuable to the companies that can least afford it. As a general rule, advertising works best on consumers with little information. (When selling a sham headache remedy, it’s easier to convince a rube than a good physician.) The lesson applies to the Super Bowl, too. New companies and products get the biggest bang for the buck in the Super Bowl, because millions of people are hearing about them for the first time.
Take movies, for example. Another study of 47 Super Bowl commercials in 2011 found large spikes in search traffic for several advertisers, especially films, like Captain America and Super 8. The surge in interest started less than 15 seconds after the end of the trailers, “roughly the time it takes to think and type “captain america” into a computer,” the researchers wrote. (GoDaddy.com, too, saw an enormous spike after its raunchy ad that year.) Movies that advertise in the Super Bowl don’t just get a search surge. They actually sell more tickets. A 2016 paper that looked at 70 films between 2004 and 2014 found that movies advertising in the Super Bowl saw a $8.4 million bump in the opening weekend box office from a $3 million Super Bowl spot. Movies that advertise in the big game tend to have larger marketing budgets overall. But even controlling for this, the Super Bowl premium is clear.
The Super Bowl’s remarkable reach can also give a lift to lesser-known musicians. In 2012, a Chevy commercial included the song “We Are Young” by a relatively unknown New York-based band named Fun. A few weeks later, it was the number-one song in the country for more than a month. So it’s not just movie marketers that can use these extremely expensive ads to blast their art into marketplace; musicians can win the Super Bowl lottery, too.
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