While much of the country watching Super Bowl LI Sunday night was fixated on the national ads, Baton Rouge attorney Spencer Calahan generated plenty of attention locally with the five-second spots that he aired in the Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Lafayette television markets.
Calahan’s brief ads—technically they were station identification “bumps” —featured the high-profile personal injury lawyer holding a football and sporting various growths of facial hair.
“One of his friends texted him during the game that his bump was trending on Twitter,” says Dave Peterson, owner of Zone Marketing, who handles Calahan’s media and created the spots.
Calahan’s ads were among those of just three local advertisers to appear in the local market during the game. Most of the commercial airtime during the Super Bowl was reserved for national advertisers, who reportedly paid as much as $5 million for a 30-second spot.
Local advertisers paid far less because, of course, their ads only aired locally. Peterson estimates the cost of Calahan’s spots was just a few thousand dollars. Still, that’s a relative bargain considering the Super Bowl garnered a rating of nearly 50 points nationwide, which means half the television viewing audience was tuned in.
Peterson estimates the game and its pregame and postgame coverage did at least that well in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, both strong markets for the NFL.
Calahan’s spots came at a particularly attractive price because he bought the excess inventory that the station typically uses to air its station identification ads. Calahan did the ID bumps for the station, promoting his own name and brand in the process.
To make the spots particularly memorable, he shot some of them sporting a full beard, which he grows every year during hunting season. As the night wore on, Calahan appeared with fewer whiskers, until his final bump ended with what Peterson describes as a “Fu Manchu” look.
“I’m a believer that good publicity, bad publicity, it’s all good,” Peterson says. “As long as people are noticing us, it’s good, and we just wanted to have fun with it.”
While this was Calahan’s fifth year to run Super Bowl ads locally, it was the first year for Premier South Roofing and Sheet Metal. Unlike Calahan’s five-second spots, the company aired several 30-second spots on FOX 44 throughout the afternoon and night, two of which appeared during the game.
The company paid between $15,000 and $20,000 for the spots, and while they got good feedback from friends, company officials say they’re not sure yet if it was worth it.
“We’ve gotten a couple of calls today,” says Morgan Bollinger, who handles marketing for Premier South Roofing. “But I think it’s too soon to say whether it was effective.”
—Stephanie Riegel
