GM will skip Super Bowl TV ads next year
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DETROIT -- General Motors will not advertise in the upcoming Super Bowl, the company said today in another sign that it’s shaking up its marketing strategy just days after it said it no longer would pay for advertising on Facebook.
“We understand the reach the Super Bowl provides, but with the significant increase in price, we simply can't justify the expense,” GM marketing chief Joel Ewanick said in a statement.
CBS will broadcast the National Football League’s championship game, one of the annual marquee events for advertisers, on Feb. 3, and 30-second spots are selling for as much as $4 million.
This year, NBC broadcast the Super Bowl and the average 30-second commercial cost about $3.5 million.
GM aired five spots during the 2012 game. In 2011, the company returned to Super Bowl advertising after sitting out the 2008-10 games because of the economic downturn.
Super Bowl commercials draw millions of viewers, and sometimes become online sensations, going viral on YouTube and other social media sites.
Chrysler Group, for instance, made waves in February after it aired its two-minute “Halftime in America” spot featuring Clint Eastwood. The commercial now has nearly 11 million views on YouTube.
Before the Super Bowl this year, Ewanick told Advertising Age, an affiliate of Automotive News, that the automaker typically used several gauges to measure the success of its spots during the game.
“We have five or six other groups monitoring, then we’ll have next-day research, copy testing, focus groups,” Ewanick said. “There’s a lot of money involved here. You have to really understand your ROI to make sure you learn from this, so you can apply that the next year.”
On Tuesday, GM said that it no longer would pay for advertising on Facebook because it didn’t find it an effective medium. Instead, GM said it would focus its social media efforts on free Facebook pages, rather than the site’s paid ads.
In 2010, GM spent$3.9 billion in advertising globally, with $2.8 billion of that focused on advertising in the United States, according to Advertising Age data.
Reuters contributed to this report.
