• by Tom Hespos , February 3, 2004

I was the only ad guy at the Super Bowl party I attended. Still, almost everyone there was looking forward to seeing the ads.

We got a chuckle from one of the first ads we saw - the McDonald's commercial where a burger wrapper pulls double duty as a sheet of fabric softener. (Surprisingly, I didn't see much of a critique on this ad in the usual places.) After that, however, the biggest chuckle we got was from thinking about how much was spent on these spots. A supposedly humorous commercial played, an awkward silence would ensue, and we'd all get a laugh when I would say, "That ad cost 2.3 million clams."

If you work in interactive at an agency, you've probably been talking around the water cooler about what $2.3 million could get an advertiser in alternative media. It's just one of those "what if?" conversations that we like to engage in. Super Bowl ads cost so much that we can't help thinking about what that money would mean to an advertiser who decided instead to invest that money in interactive media.

While there's something to be said for reaching so many people at once in a celebratory environment, and knowing that the commercials will get PR mileage and buzz long after the ads run, there's also a lot to be said for what the same money might get you in interactive. $2.3 million could get you a billion or more raw tonnage ad views across the web, a million sales leads at $2.30 apiece, or at least 2.3 million songs to give away on iTunes.

At 10 cents a click, an advertiser could get 230 million of them. An advertiser could buy out the home pages of the Big Three for several days. Or skywrite a brand message and URL three times a day every day over a major city for an entire year.

But that wouldn't be sexy, would it?

I hear a lot of industry pundits say time and again that interactive needs to get over its "TV envy." Such a thing would be easy if we could somehow ignore the facts:

• TV ratings decline every year.
• Media consumption habits continue to diversify, resulting in a fragmented landscape in which an increasing percentage of people are unlikely to ever be reached by incremental spending in TV.
• Yet prices go up every year.
• And TV continues to be the foundation of national advertising plans.

Get over our TV envy? How can we? What other business makes money by delivering more for less, year after year?

It's hard to get over your television envy when TV reminds you of that friend you have who eats whatever she likes, smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and goes out partying every night, but perpetually appears to be a slim 23-year-old.

The only consolation is that you know that one day it will all catch up to her.