I'm here to tell you that a Super Bowl ad is probably not worth $4.5 million for 30 seconds.
Riddle me this. What was the best Super Bowl ad last year? Or the year before that? I vaguely remember a fun Volkswagon Star Wars Super Bowl ad which, of course, immediately caused me to run out and purchase a used... Toyota Camry.
I'm guessing most of you don't remember many of the Super Bowl ads you saw last year or even the TV ads you saw yesterday. Truth is, folks buy stuff differently these days. Buyers are Internet informed and their buyer journey is much more fluid and starts with a Google search instead of a TV ad.
What if one of those fancy New York ad agencies convinced a client salivating for a Super Bowl ad that inbound marketing is a better approach. Without question, it would be a courageous thing to do. But it would be the right thing to do.
$10,000 USD would make for a well juiced monthly inbound marketing effort. Using this $10K budget, shifting a $4.5 M (USD) ad budget to inbound would allow for 37 years of inbound marketing ($4.5 M divided by $120K for a year of inbound). That's a lot of years of blogs, ebooks, landing pages, inbound campaigns and social media sharing.
Interestingly, there's a small Ohio glue company, Loctite, that is betting almost its entire marketing budget on its very first Super Bowl ad. Their ad agency probably told them it's money they can't afford not to spend. That remains to be seen. I would much rather make my bet with landing pages and blogs then with hash tags and fanny packs.
Whether you're new to inbound or just curious, download our 2015 marketing template to see what a year of inbound could look like.