For most of us, hearing that the Olympic Organizing Committee (IOC) decided to add in an additional 1 minute of snow clearing time per period during the Olympic winter games last February in Vancouver wouldn’t mean much, but for the IOC and companies everywhere this was a big deal in terms of marketing. As posted by the Marketing Magazine , the simple additon of 3 minutes of broadcast per game had a very big effect on advertising and money received from this additional advertising. If the number are correct, the three extra minutes resulted in an additional $7.8 million in advertising revenues for the IOC.
I wanted to talk about this because I am very interested in sports and the marketing side of sports has also always been interesting to me. $7.8 million seems like a large number for such a short period of time but when sporting events such as Olympic hockey is on, companies are willing to pay a very high price to advertise their product. Looking at the gold medal game in particular, the article says that companies will pay around 315 thousand dollars per 30 second spot. This number which seems very expensive, doesn’t even compare to the amount that companies pay to advertise during the super bowl
If these companies are willing to pay such a high price to advertise, they better put that cost to use by creating an effective commercial which people will remember. This could be a reason why some of the funniest commercials always come out during huge sporting events like these. There are always discussions after the super bowl, people dissecting the commercials they have just viewed to see who the winners and the losers of the advertisements were. The Super Bowl for me is one of the only times all year where i actually like to watch commercials. Here are the top 10 Super bowl commercials from Super Bowl 42
