So, if you spend $3 million on a Super Bowl ad for beer, or corn chips, or candy bars, you advertise something that you sell every day — and something that you intend to go on selling every day until the end of time.
If you spend $3 million to advertise a particular car, you advertise something that you’ll only be selling for a year or so. But it’s a very expensive something as things go, and your ad also serves to strengthen your overall brand. Most Super Bowl ads are really about advertising the overall brand more than they are about selling a specific product.
So why do there seem to be as many ads for movies during the Super Bowl as for anything else? With the exception of certain ‘franchises’ of endless sequels — nearly all of which are incredibly bad and short-lived — there’s no ‘brand’ as such to establish in movies. Any particular movie is only going to be in the theaters for a few weeks; it’ll then be available as an expensive DVD for a few months; and then it’ll be in that giant bin at Wal-Mart, or on the Amazon four-for-three deal.
If it turns out to be a fantastic movie, of course, it’ll be in the theaters and on the regular-price DVD rack longer; but then this would be the case even without the Super Bowl ad. But these movies aren’t going to be fantastic; one of them is another The Fast and The Furious sequel, for Christ’s sake. And all of these movies being advertised seem to be scheduled for release in about five months, by which time most people will have forgotten about the ads anyway.
How on Earth does this pay off? Must be something about Hollywood’s Chinese accounting.
