Super Bowl ads can be prime-time blunder

With more than 130 million television viewers, the Super Bowl attracts a lot of businesses willing to pay millions for commercial spots. Despite the large audience, advertising during the Super Bowl doesn't always make good business sense. "Ask all the dot-com companies that went belly-up just how useful their expenditures were on last year's Super Bowl ads," says Marvin Goldberg, professor of marketing in Penn State's Smeal College of Business Administration. Many dot-com companies spent a huge portion of their entire marketing or business budgets on Super Bowl ads last year. While they were trying to break through the dot-com clutter and establish brands names, Andrew Bergstein, instructor in marketing in Penn State's Smeal College of Business Administration says, these tactics are often a waste without a sustained marketing program. "These decisions came at the very time that Wall Street was starting to turn its collective backs on the dot-com market, especially the business-to-consumer types which were among the 17 dot-coms advertising in the 2000 Super Bowl," Bergstein notes. Of the 17 U.S. dot-coms that bought advertising on last year's Super Bowl, seven are out of business. Only three Internet companies are buying time on this year's event later this month. "The most cost-effective Super Bowl advertising is generally for big megabrands such as Budweiser or Pepsi, that spend the most on production, buy multiple commercials and can amortize their expenses over a large market and take advantage of the merchandising tie-ins of being involved in and attending the Super Bowl," Bergstein says.