Not even a month after the Super Bowl and all the hullabaloo surrounding ads that cost companies $4.5 million per 30 second spot, another event has eclipsed that cost. Sort of. Ads during last night’s Academy Awards telecast ran companies a cool $1.95 million for 30 seconds.
While that seems like a steal given the bloated price tag for the Super Bowl, Forbes crunched the numbers and found out that if you look at cost per viewer, Oscar actually takes the cake for most expensive. Per viewer, a Super Bowl ad cost one dollar for every 25.4 viewers. If the Oscars hit the estimated audience of 43 million, that figure would be 22.6 viewers per dollar.
Will Oscar ever unseat the “big game” as the place to be for advertisers? Unlikely says Advertising Age’s Managing Editor Ken Wheaton.
"It is an event. It still gets a really big audience compared to a lot of other things on TV. It’s just never going to be the Super Bowl," according to Wheaton. "People are watching; I’m not convinced though that people are watching the spots. In the Super Bowl, people sort of stay riveted to their seats and talk about the ads. No one was tweeting the commercials last night."
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That’s not to say advertisers didn’t try. Apple (AAPL) got some buzz during the broadcast thanks to a commercial shot entirely with the iPad's camera and voiced by Martin Scorcese... but it still didn't rival Neil Patrick Harris’ nether regions or Lady Gaga and Julie Andrews. McDonald’s (MCD) also garnered some attention with a commercial that spelled out the “recipe” for some famous movie quotes, folllowed by a recipe just about every red blooded American already knows… the Big Mac.
Still, even with some buzzy ads, Oscar commercials overall are greatly impacted by each year's nominees.
“I think what the Oscars depends on even more than box office is which movies are nominated. And last night, you had a lot of sort of arty films.”
That's a problem the NFL has largely sidestepped; viewers tend to tune in regardless of the teams on the field.
“I would continue to lump in the Oscars with event TV like sports for the time being,” says Wheaton. But overall, he says, "I don’t know if it’s worth the money.”
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