I found myself lounging in our so-called TV Room late yesterday, feet up on a cushioned footrest as I watched the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.
Naturally, the biannual sporting event attracts a huge collective audience, with some experts suggesting that close to 4.5 billion people will watch at least some portion of the Games this year, many via satellite.
Advertisers are paying an estimated $600,000 per 30-second spot on NBC here in the United States, with NBCUniversal stating publicly that it will generate more than $1 billion in ad revenue across all media platforms during the 17-day spectacular.
Clearly, the $600K price tag pales in comparison to the $3.5 million to $4.0 million that NBC pulled in per :30 spot during the 2012 Super Bowl, which was watched by an average of 111.3 million viewers during the annual American football extravaganza.
Some executives wonder if such advertising largess is penny-wise or penny-foolish. Obviously, few marketing decisions are rarely black or white, a simple either-or choice, and such is the case when it comes to deciding to pull the trigger on a BIG ticket item like advertising during the Olympic Games or during the Super Bowl.
To me, there can often be major additional benefits to aligning a company, product, service and/or brand with a major event, as advertiser, sponsor and/or participant.
Case in point, the International CES trade show. Held every January, CES is now the largest technology trade show in America (and depending upon how you count attendees, it’s also likely the largest tech trade show in the world).
Exhibiting at CES is not cheap, with rental of the raw cement floor costing roughly $40 per square foot for the 2012 event. Nevertheless, more than 120,000 industry execs crowded the four-day event, many of whom have buying/signature authority as distributors, resellers or end-user customers.
And yet, reaching the on-site attendees is not the only reason why companies choose to participate as exhibitors at CES as more than 5,500 journalists, bloggers and analysts from around world swarmed the Las Vegas Convention Center and the other CES venues looking for that next great invention that would rock the tech world. And just one write-up or mention from the right journalist/media outlet can transform a company from unknown to industry darling.
So . . . is it worth it to drop big bucks on a big event, such as CES, the Olympics or the Super Bowl? As Chief Marketing Officer for a growing technology company, the simple answer is “Yes.”
Would a similar decision make sense for your company? Obviously, your answer would likely be, “It depends.”
But for me, the answer would still be, “Yes.”
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