A Super Bowl Advertiser Tells Us Why The Big Game Is Worth Every Penny Of The $4.5 Million Asking Price
For a company that posted $80.1 million in revenue in its last financial year, spending the $4.5 million required just to secure a 30-second slot is a considerable investment. Indeed, many bigger brands - automakers like Volkswagen and General Motors, for example - are opting not to spend the increased cost and are reinvesting their Super Bowl spend elsewhere this year.
But Wix's CMO Omer Shai tells Business Insider a Super Bowl ad slot is well worth the money. He is determined Wix's Super Bowl push will reach "hundreds of millions" of people.
While $4.5 million might seem like an eye-watering amount for 30 seconds of airtime, Shai says that as a branding tool, the only thing on par with the Super Bowl is something like sponsorship of a sports team. That would require a lot more money and a far longer contractual agreement.
And to make sure Wix is really getting its money's-worth, the brand has started its Super Bowl campaign online weeks before the game itself on February 1.
It first began teasing more details about the creative direction of its "#ItsThatEasy" Super Bowl campaign on January 7, releasing the first in a series of build-up videos. The first featured NFL legend Terrell Owens making the leap from football star to small business owner, teaming up with celebrity chef Matty Matheson to start baking.
The next in the series was released Thursday (January 15) and sees "Entourage" star Rex Lee teach former NFL star Brett Favre how to roll his Rs (watch the full video below.)
Shai says it is content like this, seeded by Wix's "massive social media team" that is going to make its Super Bowl effort this year a big success.
And what does success look like for Shai?
"Our goal is to make Wix accessible to people who have not heard of the brand or what we do. Our goal is to become synonymous with building websites, for people who are thinking about building a website to think about coming to Wix," Shai said.
That's not something that will happen overnight, but Shai says he's set the brand an extremely ambitious target: "The thing I decided to go with is the amount of users that we have touched with the content we have created. Reach is what we want. We are looking in the hundreds of millions."
Last year the Super Bowl drew 111.5 million views, according to Nielsen, so to boost that reach into the "hundreds of millions," Wix will be relying heavily on its digital output to make the most of its big game effort.