The Math Behind a Super Bowl Ad

By Joe Pulizzi, author, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, and speaker at past TMSA events.

So, another Super Bowl is here. For those advertising during the Super Bowl, the average 30 second spot will cost approximately $5.25 million dollars to reach over 100 million viewers worldwide.

For those counting, that’s $175,000 per second.

What if, instead of buying that $5 million dollar ad spot (which doesn't include the cost of the creative), we spent that money on valuable, compelling and helpful content to build our own audience? How much content could we buy for that amount of dough?

Let’s take a look…

You can have 70 Issues of your own magazine. That’s right, you can develop your own full-color 32-page print magazine delivered to 25,000 of your customers and prospects for about $3 per copy. That includes the project management, design, editorial content, printing and postage. With the average consumer engagement of a custom magazine at around 25 minutes per issue, that’s 625,000 minutes of engagement per issue, or approximately 44 million minutes of engagement over the life of your 70 issues (or better yet, about 29 hours of engagement PER PERSON).

10,500 blog posts developed at an average of $500 per post. When I was at Content Marketing Institute, the average blog post was shared approximately 600 times via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn over a six-month period. That means that your blog posts would be shared 6.3 million times. And as a bonus, most compelling blog posts continue to see traffic for years after initial publication...or better said...while your advertisement would be over, your owned content lives on for a long, long time.

1,750 white papers/reports developed at an average of $3,000 per white paper. Do you want it fully designed and proofed? That would get you enough white papers for one white paper, every day, for the next two years.

You can get your very own Chief Content Officer to develop and execute your content marketing strategy for 30 years (at an average salary of $175,000) or a fantastic managing editor for about 50 years (at approximately $100,000 per year).

23 full-scale customer events for about 250 customers each time, including bringing in 30 speakers, presenting multiple tracks, and offering both food and entertainment.

65 books (of about 225 pages) developed for your brand…including ghost writing, editing, distribution, setup and more.

The business goals of advertising versus content marketing are, most of the time, very different. But often, marketers defer to create an interruptive story in someone else's channel instead of investing in building their own audience groups.

Just something to think about the next time you are deciding to go with traditional ad placement versus a content initiative. Remember, the content you create can be leveraged to have a much longer shelf life than just traditional ad space. When you are looking to make a decision between a number of marketing initiatives, be sure to take that into account.

NOTE: This article was featured in the 26th edition of The Random Newsletter, sent every other Thursday by Joe Pulizzi. He focuses on marketing, writing and money. Pulizzi also likes to comment on interesting human behavior. If you like this article, Click here to see this issue or past issues in a browser.