SCC Blog
A Teacher’s Guide to Super Bowl XLIII
January 29th, 2009
It is that time of year again…Super Bowl season! For educators who teach business and marketing, this is a time of year where you can have a lot of fun in the classroom, all while conveying some powerful messages that support valuable business/marketing lessons. After all, what better way to validate all your time teaching students about advertising than to point out that companies like Pepsi, CareerBuilder.com, Audi and Bridgestone just invested $3 million each for a 30 second spot during this year’s big game.
Among the topic areas that are relevant in the classroom (many relating specifically to our non-traditional textbook, The Business of Sports & Entertainment) are advertising, promotions, licensing, community relations, ticket sales and sponsorship. Today’s blog entry is written to provide you with an idea for ways to fuse education together with all the marketing hoopla that surrounds the Super Bowl each year.
Consider the following information when discussing these topic areas in class:
Advertising
Come Monday, thousands of business and marketing teachers around the country (around the World for that matter) will be analyzing this year’s Super Bowl commercials and you won’t be alone. Hundreds of marketing “experts” will undoubtedly be weighing in online, in the newspaper, on television and on the radio as early as Sunday night. Which company made the biggest splash? Which ads were ineffective? One of the defining characteristics of the Super Bowl is its ads. Companies invest millions for the opportunity to get people talking about their brands. Come Monday morning, just about everyone will become an ad critic in some way, shape or form. Hopefully you and your students will be among those who are critiquing ads with the rest of the country…
Media
If you need any evidence to support the incredible significance of the NFL’s championship game, look no further than the notion that each year, the league hosts a “media day” in an effort to accommodate the incredible volume of interview requests. The interest in the game is staggering. In fact, media day has become a major event on its own. This year’s participating ”reporters” at media day included “Ross the Intern” from the Jay Leno show and a ten year old girl who was there to represent Scholastic News magazine. Let’s take a brief glimpse inside the numbers for a better perspective:
120 - Minutes allowed for interviews and player, coach and staff interaction
4,589 - Members of the media with credentials allowing them access to media day
28 - Number of countries with representation at media day
Ticket Sales
Ticket sales for the Super Bowl are an anomaly, transcending any sense of conventional sales strategies and processes. Very few sporting events create such a high demand for tickets, particularly with such a limited supply. Consider that each player on each team (Cardinals and Steelers) will each receive two 2 free tickets with the option to buy up to 13 more at face value, plus the staff tickets for each organization and the distribution to personnel throughout the league, sponsor commitments and an allotment for season ticket holders (each organization is expected to receive a total of about 11,000 tickets to distribute among the team, staff, sponsors, ticket holders, etc). There just are not enough tickets to go around. Factor in the glitz and glamour often associated with attending the big game and you’ve got the perfect formula for out of control ticket prices.
Here are some interesting facts you might consider sharing with your class:
Stadium capacity (Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, FL): Up to 75,000
Average NFL ticket price this season: $72.20
Face value of a 2009 Super Bowl ticket: $800
Going rate in the secondary market (online brokers, re-sellers etc): $3,100 (reports suggest prices are down this year about 38 percent because of the economy, the lowest level since 2006 when the Steelers won the Super Bowl)
So, while the Super Bowl does not provide a great example of the ticket sales process as a whole, it does provide an exceptional example of supply vs. demand.
Sponsorship
Does a sponsorship mean advertising? Not exactly.
General Motors will NOT be advertising during this year’s Super Bowl, but WILL be the sponsor of the Super Bowl MVP award as part of its Cadillac brand. A great article appeared in bizjournals.com, offering several additional great examples of sponsorship in conjunction with this year’s Super Bowl. For example, the article reports that Circuit City will be the title sponsor of a celebrity flag football game on Saturday, that Pepsi will host a handful of Super Bowl related events leading up to Sunday (they are the “official soft drink of the NFL”), that ESPN The Magazine will host a major event to leverage its “Next” campaign and DirecTV will again be sponsoring this year’s “Beach Bowl”.
Cross-Promotion
When you think about the Super Bowl, many think of the Super Bowl half-time show which has morphed over the years into quite a production, annually featuring some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry. This year will be no different as Bruce Springsteen will take the stage. Not coincidentally, Mr. Springsteen also released a new album this week. The album (entitled Working on a Dream) hit store shelves on Tuesday.
In the week following Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ halftime performance during last year’s Super Bowl, sales of their “Greatest Hits” album went up 196%. Petty’s “Anthology: Through the Years” album jumped 240% that same week. (Source: Nielsen)
Licensing/merchandising
When it comes to the concept of licensing and selling merchandise, this excerpt from bizjournals.com/phoenix effectively summarizes the incredible impact of the Super Bowl:
This year, the more than 80 Super Bowl licensees’ hundreds of offerings include car mats, pewter letter openers, electric trains, pizza cutters, baby booties, rugs and leather recliners. Playing to the NFL’s assertion that the Super Bowl trails only Thanksgiving as a food-consumption holiday in America, there’s also a Super Bowl Crock-Pot from Jarden Corp., cake decorations from DecoPac, and M&M’s with Super Bowl logos from Mars Direct. Hallmark markets some 40 Super Bowl party products, including invitations, cups, napkins and plates.”
Another excerpt from the same article:
“A team might sell 5,000 programs for a regular-season game,” Steeg said. “For the Super Bowl, we’d sell around 30,000. I’ve seen guys buy a box of 25 and just pass them down the row.”
Social issues
The PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) organization is no stranger to controversy. They also have a strong connection to the NFL thanks to the Michael Vick saga of last summer. PETA is in the news again relating to the NFL this year when NBC chose to ban an ad PETA produced for the Super Bowl. In a statement released by NBC, the ad was banned because it “depict(ed) a level of sexuality exceeding [NBC] standards.” PETA isn’t alone. NBC has also reportedly banned ads from AshleyMadison.com and, as they have in previous years, ads from GoDaddy.com.
Community relations
The Super Bowl provides an excellent forum for gaining exposure which is why we see advertisers lining up for the opportunity to spend millions on marketing efforts tied into the big event. The game (and all the subsequent marketing, special event and promotional activity surrounding it) also provide the opportunity for anyone hoping to support a cause to build momentum for their initiatives. One such initiative this year features the mothers of NFL players. A group of NFL moms crossed the country to deliver 1,000 cans of Campbell’s Soup to a food shelter in Tampa Bay, this year’s Super Bowl host city. The effort, dubbed “NFL moms tackle hunger”, hasn’t stopped at the 1,000 cans of soup. They also staged a competition among one another to get more donations — a competition that resulted in more than 500,000 pounds of food items for food banks around the country.
Promotions
The Super Bowl creates opportunities for companies to maximize branding opportunities by launching unique promotions. Here are two ”super” promotions worth mentioning from the upcoming Super Bowl XLIII:
The Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” Promotion: Doritos is offering $1 million to any fan who writes and directs a Super Bowl commercial if it wins the #1 ad spot in USA Today’s annual “ad meter” ranking.
KFC’s “Wing It/Hail Mary” Promotion: If a team “wings it” and completes a Hail Mary pass on the final play of Super Bowl XLIII, KFC announced that it will donate $125,000 in the names of the respective quarterback/receiver combo to The KFC Colonel’s Scholars Program.
Endorsement
Every year, the Super Bowl inevitably serves as a springboard for a player (or players) to boost their opportunities for endorsement deals. Two years ago it was Indianapolis Colts’ star quarterback Peyton Manning. Last year it was his brother Eli, quarterback for the New York Giants. The 2004 and 2005 Super Bowls help put Tom Brady on the celebrity endorsement map. Will someone rise to the occasion this year and be crowned the new NFL endorsement king?
Fun Super Bowl Facts & Figures
* Some estimates predict more than 100 million people will tune in to watch this year’s Super Bowl
* Last year’s highest-rated commercial minute was the Victoria’s Secret spot at 9:44pm, seen by 103.7 million viewers
* The most-liked ad last year was produced by the NFL while the most-recalled ad was produced by FedEx
* Potato chips are the snack of choice at Super Bowl parties, but tortilla chips are quickly gaining
* NFL fans are also more likely to own hi-tech electronic items than the average adult
* The next biggest media event in terms of viewing audience is the Academy Awards (which gets less than one-third as many viewers)
(Source for “Fun Super Bowl Facts & Figures” segment: Nielsen via tvbythenumbers.com)
*** Teacher’s Note ***
As you can see, the Super Bowl provides a great medium for connecting with your students in class. There are so many marketing lessons that can be communicated this week. Hopefully this post will give you some ideas for ways to utilize this Sunday’s game as a resource. With the excitement and enthusiasm that the Super Bowl manages to create, a lot of these examples should really resonate with your class.
Enjoy!
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