Shop Talk

from MediaFile:

No Super Bowl blues; expect big TV ratings

The U.S. economy might be weak, but the Super Bowl still scores with consumers.

The CBS broadcast of the National Football League's championship game on Feb. 7 between the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints should draw strong TV ratings, possibly challenging viewer levels not seen since the late 1990s.

"We're looking at a big rating," said Neal Pilson, former CBS Sports president and head of his own sports consulting firm. "The fact that the two conference championships got better than usual ratings usually indicates that there's a lot of public interest."

The NFC Championship game between New Orleans and the Minnesota Vikings drew 57.9 million viewers, ranking it as the most watched conference championship game since the 1981 contest between Dallas and San Francisco that featured "The Catch." It was also the most heavily watched TV program, excluding Super Bowls, since the 1998 "Seinfeld" finale.

Meanwhile, the AFC final between Indianapolis and the New York Jets drew 46.9 million viewers, ranking it as the most watched AFC Championship in 24 years.

While a Super Bowl with popular Vikings quarterback Brett Favre might have scored a higher rating than the current matchup, the Saints are an exciting team that received a lot of exposure in the championship, Pilson said. It also helps that it's the first NFL championship to feature both conferences' No. 1 seeds since January 1994, when Dallas played Buffalo.

If the game remains close into the fourth quarter, he expects a rating of 43.0 or better. A ratings point is a percentage of U.S. television households that watched the game.

Auto show-Super Bowl TV ads don’t score for Mazda

Advertising during the Super Bowl doesn’t score for Mazda.

While the Japanese automaker plans to boost its marketing budget this year as it launches the Mazda 2 small car, running TV ads during the National Football League’s championship game in February won’t happen.

“You’re never going to see us on Super Bowl,” Mazda North American chief Jim O’Sullivan said at the Detroit auto show. “We’re not going to spend that kind of money on that kind of property because, yeah, you get a lot of impressions and stuff out there, but the fact of the matter is, do you really get to the target you really wanted? That’s more of a feel-good ad for a lot of people.”

O’Sullivan said it was a “given” that Mazda’s media budget will be up in the first quarter, as well as for the year, although he didn’t say by how much. He said Mazda, which expects its U.S. sales to possibly rise faster than the overall market this year, will spend more on social media and digital advertising this year as it tries to reach younger buyers for its late summer launch of the new 2 model.

However, O’Sullivan said advertising on the Super Bowl — where Korean automakers Hyundai and Kia, and Germany’s Volkswagen will advertise this year — is more about the creativity of the spots than the product or service being sold.

“The one thing about the Super Bowl too, if you’re going to go and do ads at the Super Bowl, you better make sure you got some very good creative because you’ll get criticized for your ads if you don’t have very strong creative,” he said. “So is it about selling cars or is this an agency’s competition? They’re memorable in some cases, but that’s a very expensive property.”

“I’d rather take those resources and go where our customers are and focus on what our brand is,” O’Sullivan added.