"Notice how most of the rest of the commercials on are for things like snack food, beer and cars where the image and consumer perception of the product are more important than the product itself."
Interestingly enough, the reason those companies buy all those ads is that enough Americans go to the store to buy more beer/chips during halftime that the ads actually pay for themselves before the end of the game. IIRC the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.
"IIRC the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.", can you provide any further information or links on this?
Shocking if true, and my quick google searching was fruitless.
At one time, I was the CIO for a nation-wide retail chain. All of our systems were real-time and we had the ability to see sales as they happened.
A lot of companies use local servers in store locations that dial home and upload data nightly. In the brick retail environment, that's pretty close to real-time.
When I worked for BestBuy the store had a mainframe. I thought to myself ,"what the hell do they need a mainframe for to run a store?" A region or a district I could understand, but most of the tasks for running a store could be done from a decent Windows box. I figured they bought a lot of them for cheap and needed for them to do something so printing SKUs twice a week was what they were good for.
When I got to university the guy that ran the IT department for Walmart gave a presentation on how they got real-time data on each store.
Any book on Walmart will talk about their IT systems. Their main operations room looks like NASA's mission control. I recall that Walmart can redirect trucks on the road via satellite to different stores whenever demand suddenly fluctuates.
As crad suggests in his reply, never, ever make the mistake of thinking grocery-store chains are managed by knuckle-dragging morons. Grocery retailing is a hell of an interesting business.
A grocery store is like a miniature, specialized Disneyland. Rule #1: everything you see, from shelf height to lighting to back-end IT, is intentional. Rule #2: in the event you see something that looks arbitrary or unimportant, see rule #1.
I don't know about the US (I suspect it will be the same) - but the chains in the UK compete with each other like a bunch of hyperintelligent velociraptors.
Quite good for customers though - in the (rather affluent) area where I live we have a Sainsburys, Waitrose and M&S food store and they are clearly locked in polite but vicious competition.
When you think about the tiny margins grocery stores survive on (1% is the commonly quoted stat), it's easy to see that they're forced to be well run. Make many mistakes and they're out of business.
Never make the mistake of thinking this is equally true of all chains. Some chains, such as Giant Eagle, are known for their data mining. Others just follow the leader.
And how would they be able to distinguish between a sale due to an ad and one that's not? Or are you merely saying that "these companies" (like CareerBuilder? or do you just mean Coke, Bud Light, and Doritos?) have so much revenue that merely Super Bowl Sunday pays for the ads?
Well, they have sales data from before the ad ran, and then they get sales data from after the ad ran. It's not a perfectly controlled experiment, but if the ad has an impact (or doesn't) they'll be able to tell.
It's so far from a perfectly controlled experiment as to be useless. You have sales before the ad ran (when it wasn't the super bowl), and you have sales after (when it was the super bowl). That's a huge confounding factor; everybody buys chips, soda and beer on Super Bowl Sunday.
They're not able to tell right away. They pay people like Nielsen millions of dollars to analyze the effectiveness of their ads at super bowl time. Those folks do regression analysis of the sales figures compared to previous years, with the knowledge of how sales in general have been, sprinkle with some bullshit so that the client will hear what they want to hear, and then deliver them back to the companies that ran the ads. (My brother does this job).
My point: they don't really know, and it's not at all easy to know.
edit @jonknee since HN won't let me reply: Except that you're advertising Doritos more than those other brands. How much of that purchase effect spike is due to your other advertisements, how much is due to super bowl ads, and how much is due to people simply feeling like Doritos are an appropriate super bowl snack?
If you have only one type of chip then it would be very hard to tell, but if you advertise for Doritos and Doritos sales spike 4x as much as your 10 other brands that weren't being advertised it's not hard to do the math.
Or you run the ad in some markets, don't run it in other markets, and watch the relative numbers. A/B testing: not just for Internet micro-businesses and Google.
You look for the change in sale rates before the ad and after it. If there's a big discontinuity right when the ad ran, it's not a fair assumption that it was because of the ad.
but the big discontinuity could be caused by the frikkin super bowl. You know, the one where everybody buys chips and soda and beer.
(This is actually a bit unfair of me; my brother makes models to analyze the effectiveness of ads for Nielsen, so I know a bit about how difficult it is to figure out)
Interestingly enough, the reason those companies buy all those ads is that enough Americans go to the store to buy more beer/chips during halftime that the ads actually pay for themselves before the end of the game. IIRC the checkout scanners enable the execs at these companies to watch their sales in real time.