The Super Bowl is the biggest television event in the United States. Last year’s game was the most viewed program in US television history, averaging 114.4 million viewers and peaked at 120.8 million during the final minutes. These staggering numbers are why over the last 10 years the average price of a 30 second television commercial during the big game have risen 75%. A spot during Super Bowl 50 will cost $5 million.
Get The Latest Super Bowl 50 Tech News In Your Inbox!
But this year a new player has entered the Super Bowl advertising game and they are hoping to solidify themselves as the next valuable platform for sponsors.
Snapchat, the video-messaging app will be a part of this year’s Super Bowl for the first time. After failing to receive the sponsorship they sought last year they pulled out all together; but on February 7th Snapchat will be there in a big way.
The app that boasts 100 million daily users and counting, has landed four major sponsors for this years Super Bowl: Pepsi, Amazon, Marriott, and Budweiser. Initial financial reports show that the mega brands are spending somewhere in the low seven figures to advertise. Snapchat however, will be splitting the revenue with the NFL. Their partnership began at the start of this season, where they ran Stories focused on behind the scenes coverage of NFL games.
The four major sponsors will run video ads in Snapchat’s Live Story of Super Bowl 50, where users post their own experiences of a single event from their unique perspectives which are then filtered by Snapchat into one massive ever-growing story of the event. The four advertisers will appear throughout the Live Story in short video campaigns mixed in with user content.
Many advertisers are still worried how they can quantify their return on investment since Snapchat’s advertising business is only about a year old and all videos disappear after 24 hours. They also do not have the tracking and viewablity capabilities that almost all advertisers want to see. With all that said, the company is actively working to advance their advertising capabilities in order to more effectively track real advertising ROI.
Aside from the many perceived shortcomings of advertising on this social platform, Snapchat has the ability to deliver a one of a kind product to a very sought after market. Snapchat’s videos are always full screen in a phone’s vertical setting, which allows for a much larger user experience. Additionally, they are made exclusively for mobile, mostly within the app itself, creating a very user-friendly experience.
Snapchat also offers the ability to run ads in their Discover section, where huge media outlets such as CNN and ESPN have been running their own daily content since the inception of this feature. In a perfect world that Snapchat hopes to achieve, advertisers can run videos in these spots for a much lower cost on Super Bowl Sunday and they could have similar impact.
Many advertisers are looking to target millennials and there is no better place to do so than Snapchat: where 71% of users are under the age of 35 and 45% are under 25. In comparison to other social media outlets, the numbers are not ever close.
Only time will tell if Snapchat can usher in a new wave of advertising money, but the numbers show that people are on their phones while watching TV. The 30-second Super Bowl television spots are about prestige and creating water cooler talk; but for brands that are looking to capitalize in the age of the Smartphone, Snapchat could be the perfect place to start.