This year, the Super Bowl featured a match-up between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco Forty-Niners. I'll discuss that tomorrow. Today, I'd like to say a few words about the ads, which have long been a hallmark of the Super Bowl as entertainment and pop cultural event. The Super Bowl is guaranteed a massive audience, and the ads are expensively created with that audience in mind, at a cost of about $7 million per second of air time. That isn't what the ads cost to produce, ut is only the cost of airing them. Production costs of course vary wildly but there is no reason to try to cut corners on this. This year what stands out in my minds were ads for Homes.com and Apartment.com., featuring Jeff Goldblum and Dan Levy. I think of them as ONE series of ads because the two websites they advertise are both parts of the portfolio of CoStar group. Of course Goldblum -- famous among much else for his park in the Jurassic Park franchise -- ha...
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Greetings, fellow humans, from the Bay State, aka Massachusetts. I open that way because I'm about to describe a commercial paid for by the state government here, to promote its lottery. That is: to get people to buy the tickets and in most cases lose money. It is a commercial that seems normal enough inside these state boundaries but outside of them, to our fellow humans, would likely seem very strange indeed. Other states advertise their lotteries by playing up what the potential winners of the lottery can gain -- the new house! the '60s muscle car! -- the chance to tell your boss where he can shove his next quarterly review! All of that. In Massachusetts, though, we are treated to TV commercials in which workers using forklifts create a sort of sculpture with the use of $1 billion in cash. (No I didn't get a good luck at the denominations.) There is a voice-over saying words to this effect (I misquote from memory, but this is the gist of it) -- "This is th...
Donald Trump's election as President of the United States in November 2016 may have changed the nature of the political game in several ways, not least by its demotion of the importance of Big Money. Big Money is receding from the scene, leaving a vacuum, and Big Data is poised to fill that space. The people who worry about Big Money in politics - as well as the people who shrug and accept it - have agreed in recent decades that the key connection between such money on the one hand and electoral success on the other is advertising: especially broadcast advertising Yet the Hillary Clinton campaign spent a good deal more than Trump's campaign did on advertising. In the first two months of general election political advertising (mid-June to mid-August), her campaign spent $61 million on broadcast ads, while allied independent groups spent another $43 million in her cause. Trump's campaign didn't spend a dime on broadcast ads during that period, and its independent...
The September issue of Harper's included a collective review of two books and one recent documentary film about sneakers, under the headline, "Joint Ventures: How sneakers became high fashion." The reviewer, Charles Bock, is described as the author of a forthcoming novel called Alice & Oliver. The three works are as follows: Where'd You Get Those? New York City's Sneaker Culture 1960 - 1987. Tenth Anniversary Edition, by Bobbito Garcia; Out of the Box: The Rise of Sneaker Culture , by Elizabeth Semmelback. Sneakerheadz 70 min. Directed by David T. Friendly and Mick Partridge. I'll just offer one brief quote from the review here: Nobody could know, of course, what was coming. In the Eighties, Reebok was the reigning sneaker king, thanks to a focus on women's aerobics. In 1984, Nike's stock was dropping -- the Oregon-based company had recently closed one of its New England facilities. Ten million dollars hadbeem cit from the company...
Q. Why do marketers of a range of products spend as much money as they do on advertising? A. Becau se they want to sell more products. You don't have to be Don Draper to figure that one out. Q. But why does it increase the demand for the advertised products? Let's focus on broadcast commercials, and on competition within a particular industry: how does the radio/TV exposure cause people to want brand X rather than brand Y, assuming that they want the generic type of product to which both X and Y belong? A. The marketers of X try to persuade people that X is better. Q. Yes, I understand. But isn't the public long since jaded? How does persuasion work, if we assume that consumers are rational? [Rational consumers certainly would be jaded about the content of broadcast ads, would they not?] A. One possible answer to that is that rational consumers, regardless of the content of the ad, measure the likely expense of the advertising campaign. The amount of money that th...