Cost of an Ad
The Super Bowl investment is economically resilient, remaining relatively stable despite fluctuations in the primetime average—and rising consistently over the past five years despite a rocky economy.

Big Spenders: Automotive Makes a Comeback
2011 was the year of the auto comeback. Spending on automotive ads far surpassed other categories and more than doubled versus previous years. Nine different auto brands took center field in the commercial breaks, versus an average of two to four brands in years prior. Creative quality also improved in 2011, with an unprecedented four auto spots making Nielsen’s annual Most-Liked list. Chevrolet’s “Wild Ride” garnered the distinction of being the most watched ad of all time, with an estimated 119,628,000 viewers watching its Super Bowl airing. This year, Chevy is breaking ground again with the Game Time app, which will leverage consumers’ simultaneous cross-screen behavior and reinforce branding from traditional TV advertisements.

Top Five Super Bowl Advertising Categories (2007-2011)
Year Over Year Spend Breakdown (in millions)

Other Spend Trends

• Beer: Bud Light and Budweiser have dominated the turf when if comes to Super Bowl beer advertising over the past five years. Consumers have come to expect the fleet of creatives, including the iconic Clydesdale ads. In 2010 and 2011, other brands like Michelob and Stella Artois came to play. What can viewers expect this year?
• Motion Picture: Movies have a strong presence in Super Bowl ad lineup, as studios capitalize on the massive audience to parade their best bets for the year. From 2008-2011, at least one of the top five highest grossing films had a slot in the Super Bowl line up. Motion picture ads increased after 2008 and have had a consistently strong presence during the game since, reaching ten ads in last year’s game.
• Regular Soft Drink: While fewer Soft Drink ads have traditionally aired during the Super Bowl compared to other categories, they make an impact by creating minute-long spots.
• Tortilla Chips: Tortilla Chips have emerged as a highly anticipated category of ads, led by the fan created ads. Last year, three Doritos ads made Nielsen’s Most Liked and Most Remembered list.

Ads for charitable causes also made their mark on TV viewers in Q3. Overall, MasterCard’s Stand Up to Cancer ads, featuring Ray Romano, took the top spot. The Yoplait “Save Lids to Save Lives” commercial also popped out as a well-liked ad overall.

Nielsen research shows that green marketing by auto companies continues to have a positive effect on consumer perceptions with 51 percent of consumers reporting that green marketing initiatives increased their consideration of the product. This is up 24 percent compared to 2010. Social media discussion about auto makers’ green marketing initiatives has also been more positive this year with a 44 percent increase in positive discussion versus 2010.

“Our research identifies how effective auto manufacturers are in raising awareness of their green products, initiatives, and innovations,” said Lois Miller, President, Nielsen Global Automotive. “We can then understand if they were able to change perceptions and consideration in a positive way among consumers.”

“We are thrilled that Nielsen Automotive has again chosen the Los Angeles Auto Show to host its increasingly important Green Marketer of the Year Award,” said Brendan Flynn, Director of Communications for the Los Angeles Auto Show. “Nielsen’s award provides an accurate and important gauge for auto makers and makes a perfect addition to the green story at the LA Show.”

Methodology
To determine the finalists and winner, Nielsen leveraged three research studies to incorporate awareness levels and perceptions across media types. The studies included:

• A custom survey of nearly 7,000 consumers’ cross-media awareness and perceptions of environmental messages by automotive brand
• Response data from 2.5 million viewers of national television advertising collected by Nielsen’s ad effectiveness measurements service, focusing on green automotive ads
• Measuring social media “buzz” sentiment within green-related discussion threads

Auto manufacturers that ran any national TV ads with “green” themes between October 2010 and September 2011 were eligible for consideration.

Looking across dozens of campaigns spanning hundreds of websites, the results were the same, showing that the web consistently delivers millions of impressions – if not tens of millions – to the wrong people.

In the same beauty care product campaign, the 213 million impressions tracked-to-date seems to be at a level that could generate significant reach. In reality, the campaign overall hit slightly more than 40 million people across all demographic segments —a 13.6 percent reach. After focusing in on women 18-34, the campaign reached only 10.5 million women.

Despite these numbers, Nielsen research shows that the web does in fact deliver audiences more efficiently than some popular TV programs with very broad audiences.

For more on these findings, download the paper: Reaching the Right Audiences Online: Early Findings from Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings.

In the study, Nielsen examined how exposure to Internet ad campaigns influenced brand measures such as ad recall and likeability, and whether the consumer said they were more likely to purchase the product after viewing the ad. The analysis showed that online ads do, on average, succeed in influencing brand engagement and opinion, particularly for ad recall and message association. However, the degree of positive brand impact largely depends on the strength of the ad itself.

The study then connected brand engagement results with actual offline sales measured by Nielsen. While based on a small number of cases to-date, the research showed that campaigns in which consumers reported an increase in purchase intent after viewing an online ad also showed a boost in offline product sales. Cases with flat purchase intent showed no significant change in sales.

Additionally, the research showed that the click-through rate for a given ad campaign showed no connection to sales lift and no measure of whether the message resonated with consumers.

• For more on these findings, download Beyond Clicks and Impressions: Examining the Relationship Between Online Advertising and Brand Building.

In a media lab study conducted by Nielsen, participants viewed related content across a TV, computer, smartphone and tablet. A 15-second video ad promoting a premium sports sedan was shown to different groups with some people seeing no ads, and others seeing the ad on different combinations of screens.

In the group that was exposed to TV ads alone, 50 percent of people correctly attributed the ad to the correct auto brand. For groups that saw the ad across all screens – TV, computer, smartphone and tablet – the ability to remember the brand jumped dramatically to nearly three-in-four (74%).

Similarly, only 22 percent of the group exposed to just the TV ad was able to correctly remember that the ad was for a 4-door sedan versus 39 percent of the group that saw the ad across all screens.

While research shows that TV remains the strongest driver of awareness, the study demonstrates that the addition of online and mobile campaigns returns the highest overall brand impact.

Social media sites are some of the most heavily visited and used sites on the Internet. Users of social media are among the most coveted for advertisers,  yet online ads are still largely under-represented in terms of their percentage of total ad spend. As more and more proof of the effectiveness of online advertising comes to light, however, advertisers are beginning to take note. In Southeast Asia for example, recent Nielsen research indicates that consumers are highly influenced by online advertising — much higher than the global average. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of SE Asian consumers said they were “highly” or “somewhat” influenced by web site advertisements on social media (compared to 60% globally). That number rises to 80 percent when ads have a social context, such as indicating which of a consumer’s friends have liked or followed the advertised brand.

Online ads that are delivered to consumers based on previous purchases or other web sites visited also resonated with SE Asian consumers, with 74 percent saying they found this technique “made their lives easier”, compared to just 58 percent globally. Consumers in Philippines and Vietnam were most receptive to such ads (83% and 82%, respectively).

Nearly seven of 10 (69%) SE Asian consumers have “liked” or followed a brand or company on social media, significantly higher than the global average of 52 percent and higher again in countries such as Vietnam (79%) and Philippines (75%). Perhaps most importantly, consumer generated media (consumer opinions posted online) is now one of the most trusted forms of media among SE Asian digital consumers. More than half (54%) completely or somewhat trust consumer opinions posted online.

As consumers in the region become more familiar with social networking platforms, their levels of confidence and sophistication in using social media increase. They tend to value and trust online content as a source of information. Online advertising can offer a high return on investment in this region, provided companies know precisely how to reach consumers.

“With USD 6.50 of every ten dollars being spent on television, it’s clear that TV remains the most important and cost effective advertising medium for companies looking to reach new consumers, especially in booming emerging markets,” said Randall Beard, Global Head of Advertiser Solutions for Nielsen. “In fact, according to two Nielsen reports released last month, women globally said they preferred to find out information on new products and services via television more than any other medium, and the Q1 Nielsen Cross-Platform Report showed that Americans are watching more TV than ever before.”

Advertising in the world’s largest market, USA, rose 5.9 percent to reach nearly USD 27 billion in Q1 with stable increases for TV, radio and magazines; however, newspaper advertising dropped by more than 10 percent in another blow to the domestic newsprint industry. Newspaper advertising also declined -1.6 percent in Western Europe in Q1.

Emerging regions of Asia-Pacific (+12.4%) and Latin America (+11%) drove global ad growth in Q1, followed by Middle East/Africa which still increased 10.4 percent despite a 51.3 percent decline in Egypt’s ad revenue as most companies temporarily halted advertising during the country’s social and political upheaval. Western Europe posted the lowest growth rate of all global regions in Q1 of 2.9 percent as the region’s divergent economic performance sent ad spend in Greece, Ireland, Italy and Spain into negative territory – in contrast to double-digit growth in Europe’s more robust markets of Turkey (+12.9%), France (11.6%), and Norway (+10.2%).

Argentina (+37%) and South Africa (+34.8%) posted the highest year-on-year gains, while other emerging markets of China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Saudi Arabia had double-digit gains in Q1.

Key Takeaways:

• Television advertising surpassed $18 billion in the first quarter of 2011, growing almost nine percent versus the same period in 2010.
• On average, ads that aired during the Super Bowl were 58 percent more memorable than all commercials that aired during regular programming in the first quarter of 2011.
• Recommendations from personal acquaintances was cited as the most trusted form of advertisement by U.S. Internet consumers (76%). Forty-nine percent said they trusted consumer opinions posted online.
• Mobile advertising is increasingly finding its way into mobile apps, with teenagers being much more receptive than their elders. 58 percent of teens say they “always” or “sometimes” look at mobile ads.
• Across 12 broadcast and major cable networks in primetime, there were 5,381 major product placements in 2010, up 22 percent since 2006.
• Reality shows dominated broadcast and cable with the most placement occurrences in the first quarter of 2011, accounting for over half of all placements. While consumers can better remember the brands of placements during Sitcoms, placements in Reality programs are the most effective at positively impacting viewer opinion of the integrated brand.

For more charts and trends, download Trends in Advertising Spend and Effectiveness.

A Nielsen analysis of the top ads debuting in Q1 of this year revealed that, while Super Bowl ads were among some of the best liked commercials (four of the top five Most Liked ads appeared in the big game), several other creatives managed to break through the clutter as well.

In fact, overall, six out of 10 Most-Liked ads were not shown in the Super Bowl, including a 30-second spot from M&M, which ranked third on the list.

For the most memorable ads, the high profile platform provided by the Super Bowl seemed to have more of an impact. Seven of the top 10 ads with the strongest Brand Recall score came from the game. The top commercial featured a Western backdrop, where a cowboy demands Budweiser when he enters a saloon. Overall, the ads with the highest Brand Recall significantly outperformed the average commercial in the first quarter of 2011 – they were more than twice as memorable as other new creatives.

Two Super Bowl ads scored on both Brand Recall and Likeability: a Doritos ad where a man licks crumbs off his co-worker’s fingers (#2 Most-Liked, #3 Most-Recalled), and an NFL montage (#5 Most-Liked, #7 Most-Recalled) ranked in the top 10 on both lists.