Purchasing

Ray Mazzoleni

Advertising: Traditional vs. New Media
March 5, 2008

Now that the Super Bowl is a distant enough memory to forget or a vibrant enough one to remember (depending on who you were rooting for), I couldn’t help but think of the money that companies spent on television advertising. Counting pre-game, halftime, game and post-game there were more than 90 commercials. The cost for a 30-second spot ranged from $2.7 to $3 million. In my mind, there was little room for error if the ad generated only multiple viewings on MySpace or made it any one of the numerous Worst Of lists.

Interestingly enough in the Internet age even negative attention is good attention. Go Daddy’s previous spots were considered risqué or controversial. This year they stayed in the same vein with an ad featuring race car driver Danica Patrick. Whether or not you like the company or the ad itself, their website reported an incredible 2 million hits as a result of its Super Bowl spot.

Cymphony, a unit of TNS Media Intelligence, reported that GoDaddy, Anheuser-Busch and Audi were the most active in the “social media space”, defined as blogs, forums and social networks in Advertising Age. If you took the time to view all the Best Of and Worst Of lists you’d find that the common denominator was that all of these ads were being kept in the public’s eye and mind. What would be interesting is to see how these ads impacted sales.

If it was my advertising dollars being spent I would have considered a Google Ad or something as low-key or low-cost, but combining traditional media advertising with the exposure of the web can be a powerful tool. Before the Internet all we could do is talk about the ads at work on Monday morning. Now we can relive them forever.

Posted by Ray Mazzoleni on March 5, 2008 | Comments (0)