Making sense of Insanely Expensive TV Ads


Impress Your Friends at the Super Bowl: A Fun Breakdown of Why Insanely Expensive Super Bowl Ads are Worth it.

Life-Changing Money for You = 30 Second Super Bowl Ad for Brands

Think of all the things you could do with $6.5 million cash today. Buy a home, maybe 2. Definitely a few cars. Hell, I’d go for a boat. That kind of money would be not just life-changing, but would bring a new meaning to the phrase “generational wealth” for your family.

… That’s what companies spend for a 30 second Super Bowl ad. Money that would change your entire life is blown in 30 seconds for some silly commercial.

The question is, is that marketing exposure worth it for brands? Is ad space on the Super Bowl really that likely to drive traffic to their stores? Check out this fun, simple breakdown that makes sense of why brands would be willing to throw so much money for a 30-second spotlight on Super Bowl Sunday!

Think in Terms of “Cost per 1,000 Viewers”

In the marketing world, promotional efforts are evaluated based on cost “per 1,000 viewers” – expressed in the acronym CPM. (Actually CPV, but we’ll get back to the difference between CPM and CPV in another article).

Now, you have to remember, the Super Bowl is the most-watched event of the year in the largest market in the world – the USA.

$6.5 million for a 30-second ad may sound ludicrous at first, but consider the fact that 117 million people watch the Super Bowl. That is a lot of eyeballs on your product.

To calculate CPM on this, follow the simple math below:

$6,500,000/117,000,000 people = $0.055 so just about ~5 cents a person

$0.055*1,000 viewers = $55 spent for 1,000 viewers of your ad

When you break it down like that, the value of super bowl ads starts to make a little more sense… but still. The sheer scale of this money is hard to wrap your head around. Furthermore, you have to consider reruns and “viral moments” on social media, bringing further exposure to the brand message. Imagine your friend makes some silly meme on a commercial, and it gets viewed millions of times… that value of that ad just shot up exponentially.

Thus, when factoring in reruns and the viral nature of social media, we can guesstimate that the CPM of a super bowl is probably 2-3 times lower: maybe around $20-22 for 1,000 viewers.

Want more details on how we got to the result, here is a YouTube video we recorded on this topic:

How can $6.5 million for a 30-seconds ad can be worth it???

…Only $20 to reach 1,000 likely buyers? Now the Super Bowl ads are starting to make a LOT of sense. And hey, bring this up at your next Super Bowl watch party, and you’ll definitely sound like the smartest kid in class 😉 

How can Smaller Businesses Achieve the Same Value for Their Ads?

For most business owners, this may seem like a moot point. Few companies, even large ones, are willing to dole out that kind of cash for a single 30-second ad spot. However, there are ways online to achieve even better CPM, regardless of the size of your business. 

If you’d like to know more, stay tuned for tomorrow’s article. We’ll explain some alternatives for small business owners to run much cheaper but potentially more effective ads. 

Do you want to know more today about running clever ads for a fraction of the cost of Super Bowl ads? Contact Ad360 for a free demo and 24/7 support today. Ad360 is a fully automated promotional platform that streamlines all your ad campaigns to one place. We can set up your highly targeted ad campaigns, find the best customers… and then you can brag not only about knowing the CPM of Super Bowl ads next year. You can celebrate sales of your Shopify store multiplying several times over – that’s what we call a game-changer.

Contact Ad360 for a free demo today!  

Frank’s story pt4: how to easily get visuals

Automatically Generated Creatives for Shopify

If you’ve been following the “Odyssey of Frank’s Shopify Store” with Ad360, you know Frank went from a dated brick-and-mortar salesman to selling online during the pandemic. 

He could even implement savant geolocation targeting and other advanced advertising features thanks to Ad360. His ads no longer went unnoticed in Google and Facebook. 

Moreover, he now had access to millions of websites and mobile apps to advertise on.

However, there is a final promotional piece to the puzzle missing here…

Frank and many Shopify store owners getting started with digital advertising face this roadblock.

Sleek, professional, truly eye-catching ad banners.

Who generates them?

Frank read online that most Shopify store owners in his position relied on some third-party app, no matter what they approach. Some downloaded Canva online to paste together a basic ad (which they had to remake over and over), while others hired an Adobe pro illustrator… for hundreds of dollars per banner. Oof.

Frank majored in business management – not graphic design… 

Yet, here, he felt the success of his Shopify store depended on having a variety of ad banners to deploy across the web. Being a one-man-show, Frank already handled all the daily responsibilities of keeping his Shopify store running and his social media at a “base engagement” level. Adding on the burden of pumping out creative ad banners gave the guy a headache. He made one while rushing, and within 30 minutes, his buddy reached out: “Dude, you know that Shopify store ad you just posted on Instagram? It’s off-center dude. It looks like you were drunk when you made it. Just a head’s up.”

Before slamming his head on the desk in frustration, Frank reached out to Ad360’s 24/7 support. They reminded him their software has one of the most powerful creative generator tools in the industry…

Ad360’s creative ad banner feature generates 15 distinct ads of different shapes, colors, and sizes. Even better, the pictures and pricing were automatically extracted from his Shopify store data.  

The guy didn’t have to lift a finger – all these creative, professional-standard ads generated instantly from Ad360’s suite of features.

Frank no longer felt “washed out” or limited testing different Shopify store ads on the web. Some were designed for “above-the-fold” viewing, some for “below-the-fold” placements, and others for almost any ad inventory shape you can think of. 

Even better, Frank found it super simple to keep track of which of these ads performed the best – Ad360 kept that data organized on his Shopify store dashboard. Plus, Ad36 automatically focused on the ads bringing the most visitors and buyers to Frank’s website.

Are you spending hours creating your own ads, only to throw them up and get a less-than-stellar return on ad spending (ROAS)? Please reach out, and try our free demo of Ad360 today for access to our “instantaneous ad generation tool.”  

Never again will you waste your precious hours centering a single ad on Canva or Adobe: you’ll get 15 original designs with the snap of a finger.

All powered by Ad360’s suite of services – try our free demo today to see if it can boost your sales and change your life!

How to use the Creative Studio?

How to use the Creative Studio

A step-by-step guide to using the Creative Studio to immediately get creatives from scratch in Ad360 App for Shopify.

1. Go the Creatives. tab

Firstly, click on the “Creatives” link on the navigation panel to go to the Creatives page. There, click on the “Creative Studio” button to access the Creatives Studio.


2. Creative Studio Page.

On this page, you will see banners that are automatically generated by Ad360, based on your product information in your Shopify store. You can choose a Shopify collection of products so that multiple products are automatically included in the dynamic banner.

  • They will include: a product image, the product title, price and comparaison price (if you have a sale on the item in your store).
  • You will have banners created in multiple formats and sizes. If you select the template you prefer, all the formats in the template will automatically be saved when you click the “create” button at the bottom of the screen.
  • The banners are dynamic, meaning that if you change a product’s name, image or price, the advertising banners will automatically be updated. Plus the banner feature multiple products and will show the right one to each user based on their interest to maximize the sales opportunities.

3. Personalize your Banners.

After choosing a product collection, you choose the template (e.g. with or without logo), and multiple sizes are automatically generated with your products info.

You can customize background and text colors using the buttons in the middle of the screen.

  • You can change the display URL in the text box, which is shown at the bottom of your creative.
  •  This will not affect where the users go when they click on your product, they will still be automatically redirected to the product page within your shop, but it will simply display your website address on the creative.
  • Finally, you can change the logo address which will be used for the templates containing a logo.

4. Save your template.

Click the “Create” button to save the templates and all formats at once. All sizes will be added to your Creatives library and can be easily added to any of your Line Items.

Frank’s story pt3: the power of hyperlocal

store visitors

This article continues Frank’s story, after the Part 2 in which Frank discovered ads across the web and mobile to reach more interested customers.

While Frank had moved his Shopify store online during the pandemic, he had spent years building a grassroots local business. All the worldwide web stuff was cool… but he felt he had last connection to the streets he used to market on.

Local Geotargeting changed that. Now, Frank could focus ads on folks specifically in his region.

This feature of Ad360 is what brought Frank’s marketing efforts full circle. Instead of burning money on ads that were shown to people halfway around the world – who could care less – Frank was able to place ads precisely on individuals closest to his locale. Suddenly, old customers he hadn’t heard from since before the pandemic began trickling back in!  

In fact, the local groundswell was so big that Frank was able to organize a local event by his old brick-and-mortar location, celebrating his reconnecting with the neighborhood. Ad360 had helped take Frank’s Shopify store across the web, but its geotagging feature had brought his marketing efforts right back home: full circle 😊  

Using the “hyperlocal” function on Ad360, Frank was able to go beyond targeting his city – he highlighted his exact neighborhood to maximize his chances of new customers and new sales. The level of specificity made Frank as visible to his neighborhood as any major Fortune 500 company: he didn’t have to burn money placing ads all over. 

Every ad focused on the couple of local streets that held his most likely customers. As the bevy of data shared from Shopify increased, Frank became a bit of a local celebrity because his customers saw his ads as much as Walmart or Amazon. When it came to his locale, Ad360’s hyperlocal targeting had made Frank’s Shopify store more visible than the largest companies on the web. Instead of wasting money with unfocused ads across the region, Ad360’s hyperlocal tech helped Frank thrive in his neighborhood niche!

Frank had gone from considering bankruptcy, at the start of the pandemic, to advertising across all social media, mobile apps, and webpages seamlessly. The whole experience became surreal as visitor traffic and customer engagement reached a groundswell of support. Frank was officially back in business, thriving off the visibility and geotargeted grassroots support.

If you want to expand your Shopify store’s online reach while strengthening your connection to your local customer base, try Ad360’s free demo today!

Frank’s story pt2: Making Ads Work

store traffic

This article continues Frank’s story, after the Part 1 in which Frank struggled to bring traffic to his new Shopify store.

Frank had accomplished a vital company goal during the pandemic – he moved his entire inventory online to Shopify, competing with all major retailers on the web. He also knew only losers and chumps rested on their laurels. Sure, the basics were out of the way, but Frank felt like a fish trapped in the social media “fishbowl” – an echo chamber he couldn’t market his way out of.

Unsure of where to start, Frank bought ad space on Google and Facebook. While he wasn’t experienced with these platforms, Frank invested thousands into marketing on social media because “that’s how many people do it now.” Frank is an expert on his store’s products, not marketing. He quickly found out the devil is in the details of online ad targeting – you need data analytics to uncover sales patterns and trends invisible to the naked eye. Frank needed to figure out how this all worked for his Shopify store… and quickly!

The social media advertising… it kind of worked. But Frank found himself as one of the 62% of business owners whose ads completely miss the mark. His social network was only seeing about 16% of the ads he put out… and it was draining his company funds.

If Frank didn’t find new horizons and more effective ways to promote his Shopify storefront online, he’d be insolvent in 2 months. Every time he looked at his online visibility and marketing versus the revenue brought from these efforts… the guy needed a scotch.  

On a final hurrah, Frank installed the Ad360 App for Shopify, which quickly introduced ad retargeting to Frank: something that went beyond social mediaHe knew he was onto something big when a few recent customers said they had found out about his Shopify store while surfing across the web.

One customer even said they heard about Frank’s Shopify store while reading a story on CNN international. “HOW?!” Frank exclaimed while his eyes lit up with excitement…

The ad technology had saved the customer’s interest in his store, and Frank’s product automatically popped up as an ad while the buyer scrolled through the news! The magnitude of that shift in visibility made Frank’s unique daily visitor go up and his sales significantly increased, without spending more ad budget. Really. We know it’s challenging and can be discouraging. Still, Frank’s story is not unique – and it changed his life and the life of his family for the better, forever.

Do you really feel you have researched and explored every vector of your Shopify store online promotions? Many Shopify owners need just a little push – and a little more visibility across the web – to truly flourish.

Find out how Ad360 takes local Shopify stores to success through next-gen ad retargeting. When customers start seeing your ads across more than just social media, you’ll want to keep driving ahead and never look back 😊

Be our next success story! Try Ad360s free demo today to learn more about leveraging new innovations in online advertising.  

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