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What Can a Super Bowl Ad Buy You in Content Marketing?

super-bowl-2012-lucas-oil-stadium-300x204So, another Super Bowl gone.  For those who advertised during the Super Bowl, the average cost of a Super Bowl ad this year was $3.5 million to promote their brand in front of 111 million viewers.

For those counting, that’s $116,000 per second.

Back in 2008 I looked at how much content marketing you could buy for the price of a Super Bowl ad.  Four years ago, the price for a 30-second-spot was $2.7 million (folks, in this market, the economy is working just fine).  That bought you A LOT of content.  Today, you can buy even more.  Here are a few examples.

  • 47 Issues of Your Own Custom Magazine.  That’s right, you can develop your own full-color 32-page print magazine delivered to 25,000 of your customers and prospects for about $3 per copy.  That includes the project management, design, editorial content, printing and postage. With the average consumer engagement of a custom magazine at around 25 minutes per person, that’s 625,000 minutes of engagement per issue, or approximately 30 million minutes of engagement over the life of your 47 issues (or better yet, about 19 hours of engagement PER PERSON).
  • 16,000 blog posts developed at an average of $225 per post. The average Content Marketing Institute blog post is shared approximately 600 times via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ over a six-month period.  That means that total shares of your blog posts would be 9.6 million.
  • 1,167 white papers developed at an average of $3,000 per white paper. Fully designed and proofed?  That would get you about 500 white papers.
  • You can get your very own Chief Content Officer to serve for you for 23 years (at an average salary of $150,000) or a fantastic managing editor for about 40 years (at approximately $90,000 per year).  For more, see the Chief Content Officer job description.  Also see “Setting Up Your Content Marketing Team“.
  • 233 to 411 webinars (depending on promotion needed).
  • 14 full-scale customer events for about 250 people each time, including about 30 speakers, multiple tracks, food and entertainment.
  • 50, 175-page books developed for your brand…including ghost writing, editing, distribution setup and more.

Just something to think about the next time you are deciding to go with traditional ad placement versus a content initiative. Remember, the content you create can be leveraged to have a much longer shelf life than just traditional ad space. When you are looking to make a decision between a number of marketing initiatives, be sure to take that into account.

Image Credit: Ken Durden / Shutterstock.com