• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, January 29, 2016

Every year, more than once, media execs and pundits wonder if the cost of a Super Bowl advertising is worth it, and every year the answer comes back, “Yes.”  It’s worth it if the sponsoring network can get it, and this year CBS is getting something like $5 million per ad.

No doubt the brand name gets out there. But if the commercial is popular and shared over and over online, that still doesn’t mean it’s actually worked selling a product right then and there.

According to an “engagement management” platform called Glimpzit and a South African market researcher, the Budweiser ad, “Lost Dog,” had 19 million YouTube views before the Super Bowl even aired last season. But it didn’t result in any brandlift. What people were interested in was the cute puppy. It didn’t make crave a Bud. (These researchers suggest it made them crave a dog.)

“By Tuesday, nobody cared,” said the Website ClickZ, advancing the Super Bowl ads-don’t-matter-much theory, That attitude would be more convincing if ClickZ didn’t correctly crush that idea just a few sentences later by acknowledging that maybe huge, sudsy, familiar Budweiser has about 99% of the lift it’s ever going to get anywhere, anyhow. 

The real thing to remember is that Super Bowl-related video, whatever it is, tends to stick around, like original sin.

Zefr, the video technology people who monitor, analyze and dissect YouTube and Facebook video and notes trends a lot of us would otherwise never see, has compiled stats about Super Bowl stickiness for Super Bowl related videos. They're significant at best, and just weird on the other end.

First off  Super Bowl YouTube videos of all sorts have collected 2 billion views.

--16% of all the Super Bowl video there is on YouTube is just related to the halftime shows-- Katy Perry (and show-stealer left shark), Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen The Black Eye Peas and of course, Janet Jackson.

--But commercials make up 33% all the Super Bowl-tinged YouTube views, by far the biggest chunk of Super Bowl related fare.

And as we reported here recent Unruly, in the business of tracking how ads are seen online and shared, says last year, 51% of the crowd it surveys said their first or only exposure to a Super Bowl ad was online. That's a ton of humanity which, in the end, is why advertisers are there and paying through the nose for the privilege.

But those expensive commercials live on forever on YouTube, seen over and over again, and made brand new every time the same brand creates another commercial for the game. Brands are wise to be there even if, as alleged about that “Lost Dog” ad for Budweiser,  those ads doesn’t seem to immediately ring the cash register.

pj@mediapost.com