Simulmedia’s Super Bowl Audience Reach Challenge II

Last year, we conducted a simple test: for half the price of a :30 second TV spot on the Super Bowl, could Simulmedia deliver a media plan that would reach more of a particular audience watching the Big Game but on other programs? The answer was a resounding yes.

This year, Bloomberg reports that the price of advertising on the Super Bowl hasn’t increased nearly as much as it has in previous years. That may help explain why Bumble - a dating app empowering women to make the first move - will air a commercial during the game for the first time. Against this backdrop, we decided to re-run last year’s experiment.

Using five different MRI flags, we built a custom audience we’ll call “online daters.” Working with a budget of $2.5 million - half the cost of a :30 second spot in 2018’s Big Game - we built a one week Transparent TV campaign that included 83 networks and about 2,200 spots, all of them :30s. Turns out that this plan would reach 27.8% of online daters. That’s approximately 20% more online daters than the average reach of a single :30 second Super Bowl spot that aired during last year’s game.

The key takeaway for advertisers: buying a high profile show such as the Super Bowl or Oscars can be a terrific part of a strategy to garner lots of earned impressions about a campaign. If your strategy is to maximize audience reach, however, it often makes sense to buy more broadly.