Time is Money, especially this Winter

The first rumours about new prices for Superbowle Ads are out here (Joe complaining a „little“ about the new price increase) and here, and some more coverage on CNN.

I am not too much into sports, so I didn’t make the connection immediately, but with what CNN writes, spending that much money on the superbowl does seem like a huge waste:

Still, some advertisers may be wary of spending so much, especially since the Winter Olympics begins just 5 days later in Torino, Italy. NBC will be airing the Olympics from Feb. 10 through Feb. 26. […] Shari Anne Brill, vice president of programming with Carat USA, a media-buying firm, added that the Olympics might be more cost effective, since a company could buy several Olympics ads for the cost of just one Super Bowl spot.

But it doesn’t just affect mediaprices:

…the increased pressure to produce ads that will please critics and viewers has some advertisers nervous. Some companies may skip the game, Scanzoni said, simply because they don’t think their ads are good enough.

Good TV ads quite often also cost a lot of money, while you never know how for sure the broad audience will like them.

I guess we’ll see more of that kind of argumentation in the next couple of weeks.

As mentioned, I am now reading Joe Jaffe’s book „Life after the 30-second spot“, so I follow this debate closely.