Examining Fox's Advertising During Super Bowl XLII

Asides from hearing Joe Buck say, “And we want to remind you that House is coming up next,” every so often, the actual broadcast of the game had very little sponsorship involved compared to most regular-season games.

The thing that caught me offguard the most was the Red Carpet show before the pregame show before the pre-kick show before the coin toss. The entire to-do was basically an advertisement for American Idol, as Ryan Seacrest asked football “experts” such as Jay Leno their picks for the night’s contest.

Every other minute, Seacrest would spin Fox to a break where the same American Idol commercial was playing in a seemingly perpetual loop.

This got me thinking because the usual audience for a football game would not be one who would want to tune in to watch a show like American Idol, which shows how different the audience of the Super Bowl is from other games. Usually, there are tough guy commercials about beer, trucks, and changing one’s own oil (something I have never done nor will I ever try).

This, however, is something that would be targeted probably more towards females, if I had to pick a gender, and a group of people who have the mindset only to turn into the Super Bowl because of the commercials (forget the possibility that the Patriots had of joining the 1948 Browns, oh, and the 1972 Dolphins of going undefeated).

As the game went on, the American Idol commercials became even more prominent than I could imagine. While most of their commercials could be in the same category as the paint in dorm rooms: boring, they did have one commercial featuring Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback Ben Roethlisberger singing in the locker room in full uniform.

I know that the commercials are supposed to make you want to watch what they are for, but as the game wore on, I had a great urge to push the fast forward button on my life to skip this decade and see if that show is still on the air in 2018.

The stakeholders involved would have been the members of American Idol, Fox, and the viewers. Fox definitely got the message about their new season out there (and with the writer’s strike at the time, I have to imagine that ratings are going to be higher than ever).

I also wonder why they have to advertise a show that is already more popular than any other show on television right now. Does Fox really need to waste their precious advertising space on one of their own shows that already does extremely well? Perhaps the makers of the show had to pay the network something, even though the rights are owned by Fox, to put it on TV, but one has to imagine they got it at a discount rate.

By my unofficial account, that is at least $22.5 million that Fox is missing out on ($2.5 million per 30 seconds of commercial for nine commercials).

I guess if I was a fan of the show, I would have liked the previews they showed, although, I don’t think I would have wanted to see the same one five times. It would have served them much better to make a couple more creative commercials like the Roethlisberger clip so that big rough and tumble oil changers would have some way to relate to what they were trying to sell.

Also, at this point in the show’s existence, I’m pretty sure that everyone knows what it is about and most have decided whether or not they are going to watch it.

Overall, I would say it was a bad move by Fox to show so many of these commercials since, not only could they have made more money, but they also could have advertised something that people may have been persuaded into doing or buying.

While House was brought up many times, there weren’t nearly as many commercials for that as there were for American Idol, and that’s a show that actually has a story line. I guess this all just shows that the companies will always focus on their big product.

Pepsi advertises even though they probably don’t need to. The same for Pizza Hut or Wal-Mart, but this just shows how the business world works. A great emphasis is placed on the biggest and best of what is available and everything else is left behind.

Except for American Idol and House, I have no idea what else there is to watch on Fox (besides football of course).

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