What did you think of the Super Bowl? No, not the game — we teach marketing, we watch the ads. I find it fun to show students ads to kick off class for a couple of weeks after the big game. It is fun to ask them about strategy:

1. Who was the target market for this ad?
2. What was the promotion objective for this ad?
3. How would you measure the success of this ad?

The ads get students’ attention. The questions move it from in-class entertainment to a better understanding of many key marketing concepts–and our ultimate goal engagement!

If you want, you can “Watch all the commercials from the 2022 Super Bowl.” My favorite “go-to” site over the years was the USA Today Admeter. That is now behind a pay wall – so you may or may not have access. This rating system is based on popularity — and it can kick off a discussion of whether the advertiser’s goal was to win awards or perhaps build awareness, create positioning, or get action (sales or sign-ups). If you want other people’s opinions, you can start with Fast Company’s “The 5 best Super Bowl ads of 2022 (and the worst one)” and read their critique. I love their choice for #1:

A lot of digital advertising is based on the idea that firms like Google and Facebook have data that allows them to microtarget advertising. These two companies now dominate advertising media. But do they really work? On the one hand, you might expect that advertisers can (and should) be tracking the success of their online advertising. Unlike John Wanamaker, a retailing pioneer who is supposed to have said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” today’s marketing managers are supposed to know what works and what doesn’t. They can see which ads bring click-throughs that result in sales. They can track those new customers over time and see if they continue to buy and how profitable they are. In theory.

In a new book, Subprime Attention Crisis, former Google employee Tim Hwang argues that theory is overblown. I have not yet read the book — it is on my Amazon wish list. That said, I did read a pretty good review of the book in Wired, “Ad Tech Could Be the Next Tech Bubble” (October 5, 2020). There I read, that Hwang’s book makes the case that “Microtargeting is far less accurate, and far less persuasive, than it is made out to be…” Most ads are never seen because of ad blockers or poor placement. Many are only clicked on by ad fraud.

I do need to read the book. As noted above, advertisers should be tracking this stuff themselves. But it does give me reason to pause.