Super Bowl ads waste of money

As everybody probably knows by now, a 30-second commercial during last Sunday’s sorry excuse… As everybody probably knows by now, a 30-second commercial during last Sunday’s sorry excuse for a football game cost advertisers an average of $2.7 million. Under Armour, who’s yearly advertising budget is $16 million, spent $3 million on its half-minute of flexing and yelling.

Some used that very expensive time wisely, with battling parade balloons and jabbering shirt stains. Others – with animated panda bears and dogs lapping up sports drinks – didn’t quite do as well.

But no matter what your feelings are on dancing lizards or buddy-buddy political analysts, it’s hard to justify the ridiculous price of these spots. I love me some capitalism, but $2.7 million is a lot of money to anybody.

It makes me wonder what else that could have been used for.

There are 153 malnourished children scattered all over the globe. The amount of money Doritos paid to show a creepy guy getting tackled by an enormous rat could have bought each one of those kids a bag of cheese-covered chips, with plenty dough left over to cover paper plates, napkins and soda.

Even better, at Wendy’s, $2.7 million means 2.7 million Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, almost 1.4 million pounds of vanilla Frosty or 16.2 million all-white meat chicken nuggets.

Not long ago, IUPUI basketball coach Ron Hunter went barefoot for an entire game in order to raise awareness for shoeless children in Africa.

According to him, there are about 300 million children without shoes worldwide. While he was able to collect more than 100,000 pairs of shoes through his incredible efforts, many of the Super Bowl advertisers could have done even better.

For $2.7 million, someone could buy 300,000 pairs of Starbury basketball shoes, currently priced on Stephon Marbury’s website at less than $9. So, what’s a better use of that huge amount of money – helping out 10 percent of the world’s shoeless children or watching Napoleon enjoying his new GPS device?

I’m not trying to be all high and mighty, either. I can be practical and I know that nobody’s going to solve the problems of the world in one night. Let’s look at the T-Mobile commercial with Dwayne Wade and Charles Barkley.

They spent $2.7 million to tell us that Charles Barkley is annoying and talks too much? Didn’t we already know that?

As of Monday morning, Wade’s Miami Heat had won a grand total of nine games all season. Is that worth $2.7 million?

Shouldn’t that at least be enough for a veteran point guard with playoff experience? What about an enormous metal pole to keep Shaq standing upright? That much money could lead to a few more wins, and a much happier Dwayne.

And how could that money help out University of Pittsburgh students? Try 223 semesters of in-state tuition.

Or 300,000 meals at Market Central. Or 180,000 $15 campus parking tickets.

Or 11,250 throwback Dan Marino jerseys. But here’s my favorite one yet – that money would get you more than 128,000 cases of I.C. Light, even with those beautiful new yellow boxes.

That’s comes out to more than 3.8 million cans of Allegheny’s finest, enough to give every undergraduate student, graduate student, faculty member and staff member more than 100 beers, or a half-decent Backyard Brawl tailgate.

Let’s forget about inflation for a second and figure out what historical objects we could have bought. The Island of Manhattan was purchased from natives in 1626 at slightly below market price – $24. Elvis bought his mother her famous pink Cadillac with a $5,000 advance he got from signing with RCA.

The Boston Red Sox once famously sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees for a mere $100,000, despite Chicago offering Shoeless Joe Jackson and 60 grand. Mount Rushmore, now a staple of the South Dakota’s late night scene, cost $1 million to blast out of a mountain. Add all these priceless objects together, and you’d still be almost $1.6 million short of a single advertisement last Sunday.

Maybe it’s just me, but this all seems a little ridiculous. I know that more people watch this game than anything else all year, but how much do these commercials really help the companies they represent? They might be funny, they might be informative, but, other than the one that promised an online video of an exposed Danica Patrick, do they really entice their target audiences?

My main question is simple: At $2.7 million, are they really worth it?

My guess is, no. But, for some reason I cannot understand, nobody seems to listen to me.

So, next year, when that game is on again and companies are paying even more for 30-second spots, think about what else they could be doing with that money.

And hope for a game with a better outcome.

E-mail Sam at seg23@pitt.edu, unless you want to talk about the game.