Super Bowl Creates Prisoner’s Dilemma for Advertisers

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Super Bowl advertisers drop $4.5 million per 30-second spot, so why are they showing more and more sneak peeks before kickoff? David Godes, associate professor of marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, says a tradeoff has emerged among companies anxious to win post-game polls such as #HashTag Bowl. The element of surprise is lost when people see an ad in advance, but memorability increases from familiarity.

“This may be feeding a prisoner’s dilemma in which all advertisers, as a group, may be better off if they all waited until game time to show their ads,” Godes says. “However, given that the other 49 advertisers are waiting until game time, it may be in the 50th advertiser’s individual best interest to show their ad early, giving it exposure that may make it more memorable -- especially  when they distribute these early showings cheaply and easily via social media.”
 
This starts a ripple effect. “When that 50th advertiser decides to show its ad early, advertiser No. 49 may conclude it would benefit from the same exposure, and so on,” Godes says. “This is leading to a slow, but inevitable, shift away from the wait-until-game-time strategy.”

Social Media Driving TV Content

With the growth of social media channels such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter in the past decade, television content driving social media action has evolved into more of a bi-directional relationship, Godes says. “It’s entirely clear that social media is driving a great deal of TV-based content development,” he says. “The Super Bowl lends itself perfectly to this because there are so many viewers who are, at best, casually engaged with the main event.”

This, in turn, implies there’s far more diversity in how viewers experience major televised events than ever before.  In the past, viewers tuned in to the Super Bowl on the same channel and shared the same frames of reference. “Now, with this bi-directional integration of social media and TV, it’s not a massive stretch to say that we are all having very different experiences from each other,” Godes says.

Is this a good thing? That depends on whom you ask and who you are. “As a viewer, it’s nothing short of awesome,” Godes says. “Hardcore Patriots fans can engage with other like-minded people during the game and at breaks. Casual football fans can look up online whether the latest Bill Belichick innovation is legal. Other partygoers can vote for their favorite ads. Great stuff.”

As for the brands, though, the answer is less obvious. “This fragmentation of engagement and mind space may make it harder to predict the impact of their marketing actions,” Godes says. “Moreover, I suspect it will lead to an attenuation of word of mouth in the sense that when everybody’s talking about different things through different channels, we may not see the exponential aggregation of chatter that leads to viral outcomes.  We’ll see.”