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By Kevin J. Clancy

Even without the inflationary drive of dot-coms scooping up inventory and pushing up the price of airtime, the cost of a 30-second advertising spot during Super Bowl XXXV reached $2.3 million. That's over $75,000 a second just for the air, never mind the hundreds of thousands of dollars—maybe even millions—spent to produce the actual commercial.

Super Bowl advertising has grown in stature over the passed 20 years, and many viewers eagerly anticipate the commercials as much as the actual game. According to a Wall Street Journal/Harris poll conducted prior to this year's game, almost three-fourths of all those who planned to watch the game said they would stay-put for new ads running during the Super Bowl. Considering early estimates that 131 million people watched Super Bowl XXXV, that's a huge potential audience. And pundits had predicted 40 million women would join men on the couch this year.

"If politicians have Election Day and Hollywood has the Oscars, advertising has the Super Bowl," wrote Madison Avenue heavyweight Jerry Della Femina in a recent Wall Street Journal commentary. After seeing this year's crop of humorous, yet mostly nonsensical advertisements, we wondered about Della Femina's analogy.

Is the world transfixed to the TV screen watching ads running during the breaks in the game like it supposedly is on Election Day and Oscar night? If it is, it was probably confused, annoyed, offended, and disengaged as much as entertained by the strange variety of companies, products, and services pitched in the 55 ads that ran. From Cedric to N'Sync to Coach Bill Walsh, squirrels to monkeys to rabbits, there was as much reason to laugh, as there was to scratch your head in wonder.

Although an AOL poll that asked users to vote whether the game or the advertising was more interesting has advertising in the lead, we think the poll's results say more about the low appeal of the Giants and Ravens game rather than the effectiveness of the advertising. Rather than herald the Super Bowl as the ultimate night for advertising, we instead hope all the annual hype around advertising inspired advertisers to take a moment to reflect on the effectiveness of advertising during the Super Bowl.

Effectiveness, of course, does not mean just humor or entertaining gimmick. Even if an advertisement inspires water cooler conversation, what does the conversation mean to the brand or, more importantly, the bottom line? As David Ogilvy said well and often, "advertising is salesmanship." And you need to communicate to sell. People may love a catch phrase like "Wasssssup!" but does it inspire them to buy more Bud or switch to the Bud? Consumers loved the Pets.com sock puppet, too, but that didn't save Pets.com. Even after laughing and talking about a commercial, most consumers are still hard-pressed to recall what company or product the spot actually advertised.

Pepsi's "Bob Dole" spot stood out because it was entertaining and registered a message—"Pepsi is a fountain of youth"—one not surprising for the youth icon for the baby boomer generation.

If we look at the audience composition of the Super Bowl, we would see a mix of consumer types—varying by income, age, attitudes, buying behaviors, needs, etc.—with a higher percentage of some types than others. Was it worth the $75,000 a second for Accenture (the nutty new name of the former Andersen Consulting) to run idiotic advertising (we liked Advertising Age Editor at Large Bob Garfield's critique of Accenture's ads as "a very expensive exercise in vanity and cluelessness") during the Super Bowl when their target for the ad most likely comprised a very small proportion of the viewing audience? Running a full-page print ad in Forbes or Fortune for four consecutive months probably would have reached a much larger portion of their target audience for a lot less money than the four spots on the Super Bowl.

Does advertising during the Super Bowl payoff? With many advertisers spending more than $10 million just on airtime, it's hard to imagine a strong return on investment in either the short- or long-term. Regardless of whether or not competitors are advertising during the Super Bowl, companies need to think about what their marketing objectives are and whether or not a multi-million dollar ad buy during the game really brings them any closer to achieving those objectives. They should also consider other possibly more effective and efficient ways to achieve the objective. If the 30 or so advertisers during Super Bowl XXXV had asked themselves that question and did the analysis, the answer for many of them would have been no. Advertising on the night of nights was a waste of money.

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