• by Karl Greenberg , February 3, 2012

Experian Marketing Services has come up with a way to derive the relevance of Super Bowl ads via data from its Experian Simmons unit. The Super Bowl Ad Relevancy score (SBAR), as it's called, is based on a combination of brand purchasing behaviors, universe of brand users, and Super Bowl viewership statistics, per the firm.

As the baseline is 100, Volkswagen, for example, has a SBAR score of 129 -- meaning a 29% lift in purchase likelihood for the brand when targeting the Super Bowl audience. The top three SBAR scores are for Audi, Cars.com, and Bridgestone. At the bottom of the list are Kia, Dannon and H&M. 

Brands such as Chrysler, Honda, Pepsi, and Doritos fall in the middle. The firm says all of the brands -- except for Kia -- will likely see positive lift from targeting Super Bowl viewers. Why not Kia? "Its SBAR score indicates the brand could achieve better lift by targeting non-Super Bowl viewers," says the firm. Specifically, Kia has put a lot of its eggs in the NBA basket as top-shelf NBA sponsor, and use of Los Angeles Clippers all-star Blake Griffin in a multiyear sponsorship deal. 

Kia's hijinks with Griffin, argues Experian, generated much more buzz than the brand is likely to get in the Super Bowl, whose Kia ad is off-center from its core sports association around hoops. The firm points out that last year’s NBA All-Star Slam Dunk Contest -- where Griffin’s winning dunk had him soaring over the hood of a new Kia Optima, which was later turned into an ad -- was a huge brand boost.   

The firm also notes that given the $3.5 million price tag for a 30-second commercial during the game, it is reasonable to argue that a luxury brand like Audi is wasting its money on a shotgun approach "because the market size of potential Audi buyers is relatively small compared to other brands like Coke and Pepsi," says the firm. But "by rescaling the SBAR score to take into consideration the number of likely buyers, the picture changes."

The firm argues that by dint of the sheer number of viewers of the ad, the cost of the ad per thousand likely buyers reached is low, and the equation balances because Audi doesn't have to sell millions of vehicles to justify the buy. In other words, a gigantic net (while not environmentally sound) is as useful a tool for catching an elusive, even rare fish as a collector's net, as long as you don't mind throwing back the fish you don't want.

"Assuming that each advertiser runs a single 30-second spot, the top three brands (lowest cost per likely buyer) are Coke, Doritos, and M&M’s. The bottom three brands (highest cost per likely buyer) are Teleflora.com, Audi, and Kia. But considering the low price point for a six-pack of Coke and a bag of Doritos or M&M’s versus the starting price for an Audi or Kia, the economics and overall ROI from the ad could result in any of these brands coming out as a winner."

Also scoring well on the list are Budweiser with a SBAR of 136; then Volkswagen, Best Buy, and CareerBuilder.com. M&M's also does well.