• by Ross Fadner , February 5, 2004

Forty percent of consumers surveyed by Claria Corp. said that this year's crop of Super Bowl ads was less entertaining than in previous years. The post-Bowl report "The Final Score: 2004 Big Game Ad Effectiveness Study," fielded by the company formerly known as Gator, found that while the ads may have been lackluster, 57 percent of those polled enjoyed the TV ads as much as or more than the game.

The study was conducted by Claria's Feedback Research unit and was not advertiser-sponsored. It found that of Claria's 40 million users, nearly 200,000 accessed the site SuperBowl.com on Feb. 1. Pepsi, the sponsor of SuperBowl.com, emerged as the winner of the ad Bowl. Unaided recall of Pepsi advertising reached 40 percent; aided recall hit 52 percent, and Pepsi's web site enjoyed a 53 percent traffic spike in the 7-day period leading up to the Super Bowl. The report found that Budweiser achieved 40 percent unaided brand recall, while Pepsi notched 33 percent.

Ad industry pundits were less than impressed with this year's crop of shallow-minded spots. "Big win for advertisers?" muses Jack Trout, president of Trout & Partners, "Big loss is more like it. As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing was a bathroom humor mess."

"Most advertisers were trying too hard, and a lot of it fell flat," adds Al Ries, chairman-Ries & Ries. Ries thinks that this year's ads were mediocre at best, and believes that the ethos behind Super Bowl marketing should primarily be to establish a consistent year-over-year dialogue with consumers.

Citing high levels of brand recall for Budweiser and Pepsi in the Claria study, Ries says that the brands' consistent appearance in the Super Bowl makes a big difference.

Ries waxes philosophical on the implications of advertising on the big Bowl: "It's like life--the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. If you under-spend, you run the risk of nobody noticing you, but over-spending is not necessarily a bad thing in a Super Bowl situation," he says, adding that the average person only remembers two or three out of 59 Super Bowl commercials anyway. Advertisers spent anywhere from $1 million to $2.3 million per 30-second spot.

Trout takes a different point of view, maintaining that marketers should be looking to distinguish their brands by reinforcing what sets them apart, instead of looking to gain recognition through frat house humor. "What's the point of a big yuk for a brand that's already recognizable to 97 percent of the population?"

Trout also points out how the Super Bowl allows marketers the opportunity to sit back and bask in the free public relations and press afforded by their multimillion-dollar spend across multiple media channels. Even if the press isn't good press, Trout notes, "people can say all the bad things they want about the commercials, but the bottom line is it's worse for the agencies than the brands. ... Clearly, these agencies don't have a clue."

The Claria report found that in the week leading up to the game, sites like Yahoo! Sports NFL and ESPN NFL received traffic increases of close to 100 percent or more, while SuperBowl.com, the site sponsored by Pepsi, experienced a 56 percent traffic increase. The data also shows that users return to their favorite web sites--such as Yahoo! Sports NFL and ESPN NFL--7 times on average during the Super Bowl season.

Publishers can jack up prices for Web inventory during special events like the Super Bowl. Search also presents another potentially lucrative area for online revenue growth. Football-related searches spiked 59 percent in the seven days leading up to the Super Bowl. "NFL" (15 percent) and "Super Bowl" (50 percent) comprised 65 percent of all football-related searches during that period.

The report's research methodology involved extracting a sample of more than 500 Claria consumers who had recently viewed SuperBowl.com. A second survey was conducted among 900 users on Feb. 2 to gauge the reaction to in-game TV ads. Claria also evaluated traffic to web sites of companies that ran TV ads during the game, and studied Super Bowl and NFL-related web site traffic and search queries from Dec. 1-Feb. 1.

"With access to over 40 million users, we are able to analyze actual behavior with real consumers, not reported behavior by paid panelists," said Scott Eagle, chief marketing officer-Claria.

Tobi Elkin contributed to this report.