[AnimalMuppet]

This has always bugged me. $7 million for a 30-second-long ad. What do they get out of it? Well, presumably, a change in peoples' concrete behaviors that is more than $7 million. They expect that (otherwise they wouldn't buy the ad in the first place).

At the same time, we're told that all the sex and violence on TV doesn't matter, because it doesn't change peoples' behavior.

So, which is it? Does what we watch on TV change our behavior, in concrete ways, or doesn't it? I suspect that it does change our behavior, that the advertisers are right. (They're betting a lot of money on their position; I'd expect them to have some basis for doing so before committing that kind of coin.) But if so, then the rest of what we watch also changes our behavior.

And, obviously, so does our social media feed...

[Swizec]

>This has always bugged me. $7 million for a 30-second-long ad. What do they get out of it?

Super Bowl ads are about brand building. They're not conversion ads. Their direct impact is to reduce CPC (cost per conversion) on other advertising.

Say you have to pay $100 per instagram conversion. Users see your ads cold and need a lot of convicing. Most won't pay attention long enough for your ad to convert. You need them to see a lot of ads.

But after they've seen your brand plastered all over the Super Bowl (and other brand opportunities), those same instagram ads might start converting at $90 per conversion. Users see your ad and go "Oh yeah I remember that brand, lemme check this out"

The brand effect is so strong that displaying a Visa (or Mastercard or Amex) logo near checkout literally increases consumer spend. Study from 1986: https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/13/3/348/18224...

Another study from 2015 showing that credit card logos increase estimates of item value: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Effect-of-Credit-Card-...

[anonymous908213]

> Another study from 2015 showing that credit card logos increase estimates of item value

Notably, the abstract of the 2015 study specifically points out that the 1986 study has frequently failed to replicate, and although it finds an effect, the 2015 study has n = 28. As always with psychology studies, we would do well not to assert their purported findings as facts, as with the statement "The brand effect is so strong that displaying a Visa logo near checkout literally increases consumer spend". Psychology as a field is far too unreliable to make such assertions with confidence.

[signatoremo]

Not able to replicate an earlier study doesn’t mean that study is wrong. More likely that the assumptions and factors taken into consideration have changed, especially after almost 30 years. The pull of Visa brand may have declined, but the effect may be as strong or even stronger if it was replaced with, says, Apple.

[anonymous908213]

I didn't say that it was wrong. I said that the field is murky and not suitable for such confident declarations of fact. "Putting a credit card logo on your checkout stimulates spending" is a very different sentence than "An experiment on 130 restaraunt customers and 150 college students found credit card logos stimulated spending among the people tested", and it is abundantly clear that sentences of the latter type do not reliably generalize to entire populations, because humans are ridiculously complex and it is somewhere between very hard and impossible to accurately control for all possible confounding factors. Do they sometimes generalize? I'm sure they do, but there are also times they don't, but the general populace treats them as though these experiments always do generalize reliably and allows them to influence their thinking and discussion of issues to an unearned degree. Such studies can be useful evidence towards a claim, but they are not proof of a claim.

[SoftTalker]

It's not just a single run of the ad. The same ad is run many times over, on other TV programs. It's promoted on social media. People see it and think "Oh yeah, that was a super bowl ad" and that makes it more memorable, and they associate it with the fun they had watching the game.

[xnx]

> It's promoted on social media.

It gets discussed for free on HN.

[wincy]

Well luckily I mostly just read the comments on HN, and I didn’t watch the superbowl, so unless someone tells me about the amazing Frito Lays commercial they saw, I have no idea which company is being talked about. Except I have been reminded that my Ring doorbell is bad, very bad.

[3eb7988a1663]

There is the cache for everyone involved in creating the commercial. So, nice feather in the cap for the hundreds of people who get to touch it.

I have no doubt advertising has some effect on consumer preferences. However, I am a skeptic that one more Coke Cola ad aired at the Super Bowl meaningfully changes sales relative to the billions they already spend elsewhere.

[anonymous908213]

> I am a skeptic that one more Coke Cola ad aired at the Super Bowl meaningfully changes sales

It actually might. Coca Cola had $48b revenue last year, or in other words, 4800 millions. Spending 7 of those millions to put your product in front of 100 million people seems like a reasonable bet. If even a couple percent of those people are (sub)consciously influenced to pick up a 12-pack the next time they stop by a store when they might otherwise not have, it would likely be a profitable endeavour given the profit margins on their sugar water.

I think there's also a longer-term status play at stake. If only one of Coca Cola or Pepsi engaged in flashy advertising to this degree, it might give them a slight edge in status perception. In the long term, even an 0.1% shift in consumer preferences between Coca Cola or Pepsi would shift significantly more than 7 million in value. So if one of them engages in this, the other is obliged to follow, in a classic prisoner's dilemma. At any rate, given that 4800 millions in annual revenue translates to 13 million in sales per day, the number paid for that advertisement is a rounding error and doesn't have to move the needle very much at all to be successful.

[hn_throwaway_99]

The irony is that this especially true for Coca Cola. They are basically an advertising company at heart. They sell flavored sugar water. For all the hype about "are you a coke person or a Pepsi person", in blind tests most people can't tell the difference between coke and generic cola. The billions they spend in marketing annually helps ensure they can sell their flavored sugar water for a lot more than Aldi sells their store brand flavored sugar water.

[cyberax]

I don't know, I can distinguish between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola easily. I prefer Diet Coke, FWIW.

I also now have a bottle of Lab Cola from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc and it _is_ indistinguishable from regular Coca-Cola to me. So it might be plausible in case of a deliberate Coca-Cola knock-off?

[2Gkashmiri]

I also "can" and so can my siblings but I actuallly stopped drinking sugar water but my siblings don't so they are "passionate" about coke and "hate" Pepsi for some reason. I don't understand

[conductr]

Pepsi is disgusting to me. To even speak of them as substitutes is outrageous to me. If you like it fine. I like both mayo and mustard but if someone doesn’t like mayo I don’t recommend it as a substitute for mustard.

[Dylan16807]

> in blind tests most people can't tell the difference between coke and generic cola

According to who?

I think most colas taste fine but it's not hard to differentiate the ones I've had.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> According to who?

According to researchers who actually ran blinded tests: https://daily.jstor.org/the-coca-cola-wars-can-anybody-reall...

What's funny is kind of the reverse is also true: when people were given the exact same cola but one was labeled Coke and the other Pepsi, not only did they say they preferred Coke, but fMRI brain scans should more prefrontal cortex activation for the Coke as well: https://medium.com/@marketingoal/the-pepsi-vs-cola-cola-expe... . That's the power of branding.

[Dylan16807]

That blinded test isn't about telling the difference though, it's knowing which is which, a significantly harder thing to do without practice. And I don't know how many of the participants regularly drink any of the brands, which makes identification even harder.

[jcattle]

Have you done a blind test before? A group of friends and I have done a blind test of around 10 coke brands before. The only ones you could reasonably tell apart were Pepsi and some dubious organic cokes. But of all the ones that actually try to replicate the coca cola flavour it was just pure guesswork on our side.

[wincy]

I did a blind taste test of Starry, Sprite, and 7-Up the other day. My wife was amused when I nailed all three. As a recovering fat guy, I’m a bit of a soft drink connoisseur (diet soda now!).

Unfortunately then the question became “well, which do you prefer?” And my answer was “I have no idea”.

[Dylan16807]

I've never had any that specifically tried to replicate another brand, no. That's naturally going to be harder than telling apart normal colas.

[xnx]

> It's promoted on social media.

Résumé-driven marketing

[ycombinatrix]

Sorry, I didn't realize we weren't supposed to be having sex.

[KurSix]

Advertising usually isn'tt trying to create a behavior from scratch, it's trying to redirect or prioritize behavior that was already likely to happen

[shoxidizer]

And of course the influencing on media networks doesn't stop at the 30 second slot when the money is spent by the million ;)

[babypuncher]

Ads are designed to change our behavior.

[senectus1]

approx 300 million eyeballs.