January 5, 2006

With $2.5 Million, You Get Eggroll

Apparently, ABC is selling 30-second Super Bowl spots for $2.5 million and more. (Who says the 30-second spot is dead!!)

Naturally, you get a lot more than a spot for that money. You get people talking about the spot.

All those TV/cable/Internet features on Super Bowl spots...print media converage...and endless blogs, chatrooms, etc. add so much muscle and staying power to Super Bowl spots that the actual air time is relatively insignificant. There are fewer and fewer venues in which an advertiser can make a big splash. The Super Bowl is still one of them.

Internet Sales Records Over Holidays

There's lots of interesting take-aways from this year's boom in holiday sales over the Internet.

It was a record year. Online consumer spending topped the 2004 holiday season by 25-30%, depending upon your research resource. In fact, online purchases accounted for 27% of holiday spending.

I find four aspects of this year's online sales especially interesting:

First, people shopped later both online and offline. That's a harbinger of even closer-in decision-making periods for vacation travel and other purchasing decisions...so that affects virtually everyone's media planning.

Second, many major retail sites were significantly improved this year, resulting in much stronger sales. Wal-Mart did an especially good job improving their site and ended up the number three best selling site of the season (behind Amazon and eBay). Raising the bar in site design and functionality means that those who don't stay competitive will fall way behind.

Third, free shipping is a major incentive offered by online retailers. L.L. Bean, for example, credits free shipping with the fact that - for the first time - their site generated more revenue than was generated by phone orders to their catalogue. (79% of online retailers offered free shipping.)

Fourth, I think that the increase in online sales is, in part attributable to people feeling increasingly time-starved. Convenience means more today than it meant last year. And that means we all need to think of ways in which our product or service responds to this trend.