Superbowl Ads only $80,000! ....per second.

Last year when Godaddy.com ran superbowl ads and owner Bob Parson's blogged about it I was hoping it would at least shed a big light on the ongoing debate about whether Superbowl spots are worth the enormous cost. I think it was about 70k per second for a 30 sec spot last year. This year it was 80k.

But since that Godaddy commercial was so controversial, featuring scantily clad model Candace Michelle as the "Godaddy Girl" it generated huge buzz before and after the game, and Parsons' insisted it was a spectacular investment, which is hard to dispute when the 2? 30 sec spots were run probably thousands of times in other TV venues and the commercial became "the ad" for that game.

Not so this year with a very tame follow up commercial Parsonts (cleverly) submitted many other far sexier versions which were shot down. These are running at places like Google video and probably are getting a LOT of play time.

Still, I doubt he's going to see an increase of 4.8 million in biz for this investment, which (based on last year's percentage that he shared) represents about 20% of his entire marketing budget for the year.

The conventional wisdom in advertising is that "brand awareness" plays a very key role and justifies a huge investment in superbowl-type advertising that raises that awareness. I've always been skeptical and favored marketing alternatives such as online pay per click advertising and website expansions, which I am almost certain would impact bottom lines to a much greater extent than offline ads in all but a handful of exceptions that really prove the rule - offline advertising is usually a waste of money. That emperor has no clothes.