Super Bowl Commercials: Ferris Bueller Is Back & Why I Miss Bud Bowl

I miss the Bud Bowl. There were at least two years in the late 1980s where the results of the Bud Bowl were more entertaining than the actual Super Bowl. Don't tell me when Bob Costas comes onto your pre-game Super Bowl TVs next Sunday, you won't openly wish he was back calling play-by-play for the Bud Bowl.

Lest we forget, the span of years between 1980 and 1990 provided exactly two Super Bowls decided by fewer than 10 points. (Both of those games, coincidentally, included the 49ers and Bengals.) It felt like year after year we suffered through 38-9, 38-16, 46-10, 39-20, 42-10, 55-10…stop me when you've had enough, Broncos fans.

The 1990s weren't much closer and most fans came to expect a mediocre Super Bowl. There was a good 20-year span when a close game was the exception, not the rule. Sports fans have been spoiled lately with how competitive the Super Bowl has become. (Note: this is not a complaint.)

With seemingly decades full of boring games, we needed something to drive our collective competitive spirit, which meant two things: box pools and Super Bowl commercials. We used to talk about the Bud Bowl in school like it was an actual game and we were 11 years away from legal drinking age! (Keep in mind, this was a time in our lives when most of us still thought wrestling was real.)

While no Super Bowl campaign will come close to the imagination and resonance of the Bud Bowl series, Super Bowl commercials have only become more important and more dissected than ever. Who wins the Super Bowl is still more important, yes, but who wins the battle of the ads will get just as much publicity coming out of the game.

With that—and with the fact that more than 110 million people will be tuning in to this year's Super Bowl—NBC is raking in a reported $3.5 million per 30-second spot. Let’s break that down: companies advertising with during the Super Bowl are paying $116,666.67 per second to advertise during the Super Bowl.

With that much money on the line, the need for further return on that investment had to become part of every company's business plan. We are already starting to get teasers to promote certain ads during the Super Bowl. Yes, Super Bowl ads have their own previews, one of which currently stars Matthew Broderick in a reprisal of his Ferris Bueller character. Word is, he's schilling for a car company and, no, he's not selling a vintage Ferrari. I'm as mad as you are.

Over the next week leading up to the Super Bowl, dozens of ads will leak out before the game in an effort to grab some bonus pre-Super Bowl attention. Some have already started to go viral. After the game, countless websites will list the best and worst ads—make sure to check out my list on B/R just after the game—adding to the after-market benefit of being one of the Super Bowl advertisers. Surely, paying nearly more than $100,00 a second can get most companies far more back in return.

Now, the key for companies is to spend those millions wisely and that usually means spending even more millions on widespread ad campaigns with the one 30-second spot (or series of spots) during the Super Bowl as a proper launch. There is so much at stake for advertisers who pay to be part of the Super Bowl telecast that, many times, it paralyzes them from doing anything actually memorable. Agencies are so concerned about offending potential customers they've mostly fallen into a boring middle-ground where very few ads are actually all that memorable.

Sure, there are a few. The Volkswagen ad last year with the little kid in a Darth Vader helmet still stands out—and with 49 million views on YouTube, you can say the spot was far more valuable than just a Super Bowl ad. The monkeys in the CareerBuilder.com ads a few years ago will never not be funny.

Then we get ads like the Geico cavemen or E*Trade baby which worked for a year or two, but keep getting thrown out season after season until it's past the point of being funny in any conceivable way. In fact, some ads can actually turn customers away, especially if they're trying to be funny and aren't (or come off as offensive).

I wish the Bud Bowl, or something similar, would come back. I wish a company would throw it all in to bust out half a dozen brilliant spots throughout the game to keep fans interested in a side story during each commercial break. Of course, to do that would cost more than $20 million dollars, so companies that do spend that much during the game to promote several different brands—think Bud, Bud Light, Bud Light Lime, Bud Ice, Michelob Ultra—would certainly be reluctant to throw all their cash into one specific marketing campaign.

What if it tanks? 

No ad campaign is worth that amount of investment in one show, 110 million people or not. As invested as we will be in this year's Super Bowl ads, it remains to be seen how many will have people talking about them next year…or, like the Bud Bowl, in 20 years.