Tallying up the score for Super Bowl ads

Even in the age of TiVo, there’s still one day when no one wants to fast forward through TV commercials. On Super Bowl Sunday, advertisers across the country celebrate their craft with some of the most expensive, carefully-produced commercials of the year.

Commercials like the eTrade babies ad and the Google search-box love story were viewed by the 100+ million people watching the most recent Super Bowl. And from Go-Daddy to Focus on the Family, companies and advocacy groups spent close to $3 million for each 30-seconds of that captive audience’s attention.

But was all that money really worth it? One group of researchers tried to find out, and Casey Miner has the story.

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CASEY MINER: Let’s go back in time a bit. Before the New Orleans Saints upset the Indianapolis Colts to win Super Bowl 44, before pundits had rehashed and dissected all the commercials aired during the game. Before all that, a hundred million people reacted to more than 50 ads that altogether cost close to $250 million. But did any of those ads actually work? There was one Super Bowl party in San Francisco where you could find out. 

In some ways, it was just like any other game day gathering: 30 people, ten pizzas, six couches, five TVs, and one giant keg. But this party was not like all the others.

BRIAN LEVINE: One of the articles that was written about this was, “Wired hosts nerdiest Superbowl ever.” That was probably my favorite one.

Brian Levine is the cofounder of Innerscope Research, and the main reason this party wasn’t just a party. For the past three years, Levine and his team have studied how people react to Super Bowl commercials. They’re here to find out what excites people. And it’s not always the same things.

In carefree 2008, the most effective ads were for recognizable brands like Pepsi and Bud Light. But in the recession of 2009, the ads that got people’s attention and held it were for sites like Careerbuilder.com and services like Cash4Gold.

To find out what was on people’s minds this year, they set up shop in the San Francisco office of wired.com, where about 25 people agreed to spend the afternoon hooked up to sensors that would track their responses to the ads.

INSTRUCTOR: This wire will come out underneath your shirt. Just go ahead and velcro that to the wrist that you won’t be using, like, your non-dominant wrist.

Before the game, everyone suited up. This meant a band wrapped around the chest, and wires running down to the hands. The sensors in the device measured changes in heart rate, breathing, and movement. These responses are subconscious. Levine says you might not even feel yourself sweating or leaning forward, but everything shows up on the graph.

LEVINE: Even if our cognitive brains are saying, “Maybe we don’t need to buy that Hyundai right now,” our bodies are still buying it. And so we’ll still measure that very directly, the emotional response.

For the measurements to be accurate, the researchers had to make some rules. And some of them were a little weird. This was probably the only party in town where you were only allowed to drink one beer each quarter. And it was definitely the only party in town where you were supposed to go to the bathroom during the game.

INSTRUCTOR: Please only go to use the restroom during the game. I know it’s an odd request. 

Another rule was that you couldn’t move too much, so once the game got going, a few researchers ran around delivering pizza and chips. The others sat at laptops, monitoring the group’s responses on a graph that ran in real time. When an ad worked, the graph spiked. When it bombed, the line flattened out. 

Denny’s screaming chickens weren’t so effective. But that one chicken screaming in space? She brought the house down.

In the end, though, none of the ads did that well. At least not compared to the game. Turns out, even this room full of self-described nerds was really, really into the Saints.

LEVINE: There was a call that looked like it should have been challenged, there was going to be a replay, nobody here knew what was going to happen then suddenly it went to commercial break. And certainly everyone yelled out, “Ahhh!” And then it went to an ad for Dante’s Inferno, a video game for Electronic Arts, and engagement just dropped like a rock. It wasn’t a great place to have an ad.

By the end of the day, the researchers had four hours worth of data, which it would take them weeks to dissect. But one thing was clear: the Super Bowl has winners and losers, and today, the ads were the losers.

In San Francisco, I’m Casey Miner for Crosscurrents.