Only Nine Percent Average Recall for Brand and Advertiser in Super Bowl Commercials

Do you Remember Super Bowl Commercials?

NORWALK, CT- February 26, 2007– Every year companies pay millions of dollars for 30 or 60 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl. Many look forward to these commercials as much as the game itself. Are the commercials themselves becoming more famous than their sponsors? One might be lead to believe that most people watching the Super Bowl generally do not remember the ads, and even if they do, will have difficulty matching these commercials to the brands they represent. Are Super Bowl ads a waste of money or a fantastic investment? This topic represents a wildly polarizing discussion between those that watch the commercials and those that create them.

Markitecture set out to shed light on this often-controversial subject. One week after the Super Bowl, we conducted an online survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,500 people who watched the game. Respondents were given a list of commercial descriptions – without brands – and were then asked which of the ads they recalled seeing during the game. Incredibly, no single advertisement received more than a 50% advertising recall, with the average being only 19%.

Further testing the topic, we asked about brands that actually had a commercial in the Super Bowl, together with others that did not advertise at all. Brand recall varied greatly in this case, ranging from 8% to 94%, but with a fairly unrespectable average of 40%. As for recall of BOTH the advertising and the brand it represented, this recall fell from 0% to 34%, with an average of only 9%. Half of the commercials had a pure advertising and brand recall of less than 5%.

As we all know, many of the commercials continue to be aired and even go on be regarded as break-through advertisements. What we have found, though, is that many fall quickly into a chasm of unremembered advertisements, even after a lot of time, resource and monetary investments have been made.

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Media Contact:
Deborah Esposito
Markitecture
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