Super Bowl Commercials 2012: Why Ads Are Biggest Draw to Unofficial Holiday

An unprecedented oddity of culture has occured—the Super Bowl has been surpassed in hype by its commercials.

This makes it the one event in the history of creation where the commercials are interrupted by the event. 

Last year's Super Bowl was viewed by 111 million people, and that was just in America. And let's just say that many of these people are not tuning in just for the game. 

You don't have to take my word for this. Lori Rackl of the Sun Times has my back here:

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A 2010 Nielsen survey found that 51 percent of the Super Bowl’s audience enjoys the commercials more than the game.

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There is the group of hardcore football junkies, like yours truly, who will look towards the game first and foremost. Then there is a wide ranging and vast group of people who are in it for the spectacle, and the front and center of that is the commercials.

There certainly is a reason for that. Companies that can afford it have made commercials the centerpiece of their advertising campaigns. 

This leads to companies expending huge budgets on development, production and landing big-name actors. In fact, some of these commercials will exceed in quality the majority of the sitcoms on the network the game is broadcast on. 

Like this Acura commercial featuring Jerry Seinfeld, which will air during this year's broadcast. 

That is the funniest Seinfeld has been since the episode before the finale of the iconic sitcom bearing his name. 

Which is good news for Acura because that spot, if shown in its entirety, will cost them roughly $12 million to air. The going rate for 30 seconds of ad time during the broadcast is a staggering $3.5 million this year. 

The fact that companies are willing to shell out this kind of coin is a testament to the power of the Super Bowl ad.

Good commercials debuted during the Super Bowl quickly become a part of pop culture.

There may not be a better example of this than the Bud Bowl. 

In 1989, Budweiser launched this iconic spot, and for a few years an made up game played by beer bottles generated almost as much buzz as the game itself. 

The Bud Bowl even has its own Wikipedia page. 

Ad campaigns like that built up a buzz and a sense of expectations for entertainment potential of commercials.

It created buzz and got people talking at the water cooler more than the typical not-very-close Super Bowl.

Commercials that succeed in the Super Bowl can help keep well known products at the forefront of their industry. It roots itself in people's heads, and the next thing you a vast army of consumers are thinking about this product wether they want to or not.

Sometimes I still bring up this Doritos ad from two years ago. 

It not just the good commercials that get people tuning in either. There are ads that bomb. And making fun of these spectacular flops can be as fun as enjoying a good ad. 

Like this commercial from Apple in 1985. 

That ad didn't help sell any Apple computers, but it did help cement the notion that Super Bowl commercials need to be seen.

The high stakes, big money and drawn out thought put into these spots means the results are often going to be spectacular—for good or ill. 

All of this has made the commercials an event, and that helps make Super Sunday a deliriously glorious day of immensely overblown proportions.