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The 46th Super Bowl, featuring the New England Patriots and the New York Giants, is right around the corner. But for many viewers, more important than which teams are playing is the question of which commercials will stand out from the rest. 
For the 2012 Super Bowl, advertising costs have reached $3.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime—a significant jump from the 2011 level of $3 million for 30 seconds. But other numbers seem to justify the price increase, in that 111 million people watched last year’s Super Bowl XLV, a record for the largest audience to watch an individual television program.
Most of the familiar brands will return to this year’s commercial lineup, including Anheuser-Busch, Bridgestone, CareerBuilder, Cars.com, Coca-Cola, General Motors, GoDaddy.com, Hyundai, PepsiCo, Toyota, and Volkswagen. The Mars candy company also has some big plans for its M&Ms brand: It will be introducing a new character to represent the long ignored brown candies.
Ms. Brown will join the red, yellow, blue, green, and orange M&Ms characters. She takes on the position of Chief Chocolate Officer. It seems hard to believe that brown M&Ms have never been represented with a cartoon spokes-character, and consumers have asked about it. For example, a 2010 contest that asked consumers to vote for their favorite character pushed many of them to wonder why they could not yet vote for brown M&Ms.
Thus the timing seems perfect. M&MS have been missing from quite a few recent Super Bowls, as Mars focused its budgets on advertising its Snickers brand. But the arrival of Ms. Brown makes for an exciting new substitution on the field.
Discussion Questions:
- Why might Mars choose this platform to introduce Ms. Brown?
- Are Super Bowl commercials worth their high prices?
Source: Stuart Elliott, “M&M’s to Unveil New Speaking Role at Super Bowl,” The New York Times, January 16, 2012.
Grewal Levy Marketing News 
I feel Mars has chosen this platform to introduce Ms. Brown so that a majority of the country is introduced to her right away. If she is introduced at a different time, it will take much longer to reach the over 100 million people that will be tuned in to watch the Super Bowl. In fact, if they wait, 100 million people may never see Ms. Brown. For this reason, I think Super Bowl commercials are worth their high prices. They allow a company to reach such a huge audience, that I feel they are getting good value for their money. If a memorable commercial is launched during the Super Bowl, hundreds of millions of people will be talking about it at work, online, and in school. This being said, a great Super Bowl commercial has the capability of reaching a staggering amount of people.
Looking back at this article nearly a year after it was published, the launch of Ms. Brown during the Super Bowl seems to have been fairly successful. I remember hearing from a lot of people that the M&Ms commercial was one of their favorites and since that commercial there have been quite a few other Ms. Brown commercials that have also been fairly popular. I do not know how this advertising campaign has worked, but Ms. Brown has certainly become a well-known character in American households. As for the price of Super Bowl commercials, I think that it is a solid investment if handled correctly. Not only will a company’s commercial been seen at a time when nearly every American has his or her eyes glued to the TV screen, but Super Bowl commercials have been known to live throughout the ages. Leading up to the Super Bowl every year, multiple television stations show their selection of the “Top Super Bowl Commercials in History”. If done creatively, Super Bowl commercials can be seen not only during the Super Bowl but also for years to come, which makes them a solid investment for certain companies.