Thursday, December 17, 2009

Pepsi not advertising at SuperBowl this year

Pepsi will end it's 23 year streak of advertising during the SuperBowl and instead conserve it's funds so it can put more strength into it's online efforts.

See the whole article here.

How expensive is it to advertise during the biggest football game of the year?
Last year it cost an average of 3 million dollars for a 30 second spot.

That's a lot of Pepsi to sell to cover that bill!

There is no reason to 'doubt' Pepsi's reasons for pulling out of SuperBowl this year, but one has to wonder if they are just being polite. In other words, are they selling 6 or 8 million Pepsi's per ad? Have they finally decided that they are not getting enough bang for the buck?

It's incredibly hard to gauge. If they were offering an entirely new product/brand, then you could count sales for 10 days following SuperBowl and estimate a majority came from the ad. But to spend 3 million dollars for 30 seconds to show off an already globally-recognized product...how do you know if the marketing is WORKING?!

Last year, FedEx sat out the SuperBowl...and they plan to do so again this year.
Maybe Corporate America is finding that the price tag is just too high, and not worth it.

I once worked for a company that participated in a big trade show each year.
We got very little business from the show itself...but it was a 'status symbol' to be there.

So if you were NOT there, it looked bad. People would talk. Rumours would start.

Maybe Pepsi (and many others) has been hanging in just so no one speculates that they can't afford to be there?

By sticking their neck and their press release out NOW to announce the parting of ways...and to use an excuse that will draw attention and get people looking for new marketing...Pepsi has squashed any rumours. Personally, I say let Coke spend the millions of millions just to say they were there. It's a very costly venture.

(and watch them fight it out on www.Squidoo.com/CokevsPepsi!)

We all know that marketing endeavors are only valuable if you can measure them.
If you don't know how many Pepsis your 30 second spot sells, then 3 million dollars is 2.9 million dollars too many!

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