Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time? 347
samzenpus writes "Every year companies are willing to dish out big bucks to reach tens of millions of consumers with their Super Bowl ads. With an average price tag of $4 million for a 30-second commercial, this year is no exception. We've seen: beer obsessed frogs, field goal kicking horses, celebrities drinking various beverages, explosions of all sizes, homages to 1984, and day trading babies in the past. Since talking about the commercials has become almost as popular as the game itself, here's a place to do just that. What have you liked and what do you think would have been better left on the cutting room floor."
Re:Ads are toxic. (Score:2, Informative)
The NFL is toxic.
CPM -- cost per thousand (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Shitty content. Shitty beta site. Stagnant tra (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, and they seem to be banking on this SlashCloud and SlashBI, etc. SlashBullShit as of late so I bet they're going in the "original content" with minimal user interaction/minimal community direction. I bet the slashdot.org domain will be up for cheap in a couple years when DICE has finished looting the last corpse here so if someone still has an installation of SlashCode laying around we could probably get the site back up to speed pretty quickly in that eventuality.
It must suck to be Malda and see your website baby all grown up to be a junkie whore like this.
Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far (Score:5, Informative)
Hey, guys -- THEY STILL SELL PARTS. They've just compacted them into a set of shallow drawers, rather than displaying them on pegboard. I haven't counted, but it seems to me that they've got a better selection of components than they did in the 80s. Besides the obvious (how many varieties of blue LEDs and microcontrollers did they carry in 1980?), they've still got fairly robust coverage of things like DC connectors and resistors/capacitors/other passive stuff.
I miss having the nerd stuff prominently displayed, but if they need to give more square footage to phones to stay afloat, I'm happy to pull out drawers instead of seeing it all disappear.
(Remember Lafayette Electronics, another chain that sold components? If so, you're old, too.)
Re:slashdot... (Score:4, Informative)
That's because most ads are dull and boring and played to saturation.
But when ads cost $4M per 30 second slot, it tends to bring out the most creative because it's costing a LOT of money to run the ad, so using it to run a plain jane ad is stupid because you can buy timeslots for 1/40th the price every other day of the week.
So some of the best ads you see will be on during the superbowl, and that's it very few are run again, unless they're up for awards (in which case they have to run on regular TV).
Plus, it's all about ratings. The C3 numbers for the superbowl are huge (Commercial+3), which is how ad prices are set. Neilsen sells those numbers so stations can set ad rates. The "public" numbers of L, L+SD, and L+7 are "given away" to show how popular a show is. The difference is that the C numbers subtract out the non-commercial content from the ratings (i.e., the programming).
Sports is one of the highest rated shows on TV, and outside of sports, only TBBT really scores anything significant, but well short of sports. The superbowl pretty much feeds the idea - the sport brings in the audience which raises rates, the raised rates bring up the ante on what ads can do because no one wants to epend millions running the same old ad you can see everywhere else, so they run special ads. Which attracts more audience because the ads are new, novel and often only run that time.
In fact, TV stations say they care about TV show piracy, but they really don't. Because the C3 numbers they buy don't include the programming. All it means is the ratings go down, the show gets less money and it's either make do or get cancelled.
Or why they're more than happy to stream TV because the ads are unskippable.
Re:Radio Shack Ad Best So Far (Score:5, Informative)
**Some** Radio Shack stores still sell parts, mostly the stand-alone stores. The ones in the malls are almost completely cellphones and junk R/C toys.
Re:Commercials (Score:5, Informative)
You mean, like subscription TV service, aka, cable or satellite? I vaguely remember when our house got hooked up for cable about 30-ish years ago and the promise* then was that the cable-based channels would be mostly ad-free since we were paying up front. That lasted more or less 10-15 years I'd say (if you give networks a pass on promos for their own lineups).
Then you're misremembering. There's a huge difference between ad-free networks being mostly on cable (the actual historical situation) and cable being mostly ad-free networks (how many people incorrectly remember the "good ol' days" of cable). Cable television has always had advertisements, barring a few notable premium channels such as HBO and, of course, public television stations. Many channels were nothing but ads, such as home shopping channels and local access stations that ran infomercials for something like 20 out of 24 hours a day.
Originally, cable television was merely a way to get television into areas that were unable to receive broadcast signals, thanks to geography or other factors, and carried only the networks, which had ads. Eventually some "superstations" rose up that were only available via cable out-of-market, the first of which was Ted Turner's WTCG (later WTBS) and eventually stations like WGN and WOR, and all of those had ads. Later, almost all cable-only channels such as ESPN, MTV, and CNN have run ads since their inception.
What you're mostly likely remembering is the commercials for specific premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, and Disney (prior to 1997) that advertised that their channels were ad-free, but these were the exception and commanded extra fees in addition to your normal cable bill, not true of cable television in general.
Re:1984 (Score:5, Informative)
I honestly don't understand why Apple is on this list. They're pretty much the final computer company that will just sell you a computer, and not tie it into a million services that track your identity, and try to spam you/sell you.
Setting up Mavericks:
- "Oh, hey, sign in with your AppleID for everything iCloud!" No, shut up, I don't need your crap.
- "You really should turn on location services so we know where you are at any given time!" No, shut up, you don't need that.
- "Hey, in order to update the applications that come with the OS by default, you're going to need an AppleID with a credit card attached." No, shut up.
Please, tell me again how Apple isn't trying to tie me into a million services that track me.