It costs a lot to advertise. Thirty seconds on a hit network show can be upwards of $100,000. A spot on the Academy Awards broadcast is going for more than $2.5 million. Spots on the Super Bowl cost upwards of $5 million.
And remember, those numbers are just for one spot -- 30 seconds that interrupt a program, when many viewers run to the kitchen or the bathroom. And a key element of advertising is frequency -- ads have to be seen many times in order to have a real impact.
So some advertisers use PR -- publicity -- to extend the reach of their ads at relatively little cost. Think of the super bowl of advertising venues -- the Super Bowl. Many advertisers use PR to hype their ads before the big game, pushing for stories in the media and getting them seen and talked about via social media.
Advertisers sometimes do something intentionally controversial in hopes of getting a bigger bang thanks to PR. We saw an example just last week, in some outdoor ads in Boulder, Colorado for a local chain of sushi restaurants called Hapa Sushi. According to ADWEEK, the chain ran a series of ads on kiosks and bus shelters downtown that used tweets by the president, unedited. One ad shows a presidential tweet threatening the head of North Korea, followed by the words "Eat well before it all ends." Another used a tweet that reads "The global warming we should be worried about is the global arming caused by NUCLEAR WEAPONS in the hands of crazy leaders!"
Some Boulder officials missed the humor and asked the advertiser to edit the ads. Instead, the sushi chain agreed to take the ads down after only a few days. But they garnered attention in the local newspaper, the Boulder Camera, local TV and other media around the state.
Minimal ad expense -- bigger bang through publicity.
Years ago, one of my clients -- an ad agency -- was planning to run a huge billboard ad in the Times Square area, directly opposite a church. The ad, for a maker of high-end toilets, showed people from behind standing at toilets, with their butts fully or partially exposed.
After the church voiced a complaint to the billboard company, the story got out to the media. It ended up running in newspapers and on TV in New York and nationwide, with most of the stories showing the proposed ad, along with the name of the advertiser.
A few weeks later, after the news died down, my client admitted that they had never actually planned to run the ad. They had tipped off some folks at the church, which prompted the complaint to the billboard company. And they gave the story to a friend in the media. Once one outlet wrote about it, it exploded everywhere else.
Afterwards, they asked me to do an ad equivalency evaluation for them, and the "free" exposure ,they got was worth several million of dollars. And they never paid a dime for an actual ad, other than the very minor expense of having a mock ad created.
Clever? Devious? You decide. It worked. It caused some laughs, and no one got hurt.