Cars.com Super Bowl Ad, Worth $3 Million?

Grade: 6 / 10

In this year’s Cars.com Superbowl ad, we follow Timothy Richman — much like Abernathy in 2009 — along his incredible journey, where knowledge empowers him to do great things. The commercial tells the many extraordinary tales of Timothy, including how he used his knowledge of veterinary obstetrics to deliver a Tiger whelp — quite ridiculous, but not without its charm. Though this charm might be appreciated by the 64 percent of guys watching the Superbowl, if we take a deeper look, nearly half of Cars.com’s audience is female.

Cars.com’s audience not completely in-line with Superbowl viewers. Age is almost right on, as the majority of Cars.com users are 18-34 (or 38 percent), and 27 percent of Superbowl users are 18-34. Gender is a different story. Sixty four percent of Superbowl fans are male, while Cars.com have an almost even male / female balance (women need cars too).

While the Cars.com’s commercial is not without its merits, dropping $3 million on one TV spot is an incredibly high ad spend to reach only half of your audience. With nearly $100,000 a second, Cars.com is putting a lot of eggs in one basket. It might make sense for Budwieser, as its target audience is predominately male. Cars.com? Not so much. For just three seconds, or $300,000, Cars.com could hire social marketing guru Chris Brogan to run an “incredibly extensive six-month marketing program, including blogs, video, audio, and webinars, generating consistent new creative ideas.” Such targeted campaigns would most likely give Cars.com more bang for their buck as it could reach both males and females.

Looking at Cars.com’s web traffic, maybe they should take the advice. Cars.com has advertised during the Superbowl for the past three years. How has that worked out? Around this time in ’08, Cars.com had 4.8 million monthly unique users; ’09, 3.6 million; and now, around an estimated 3 million, according to Quantcast. Suggestion: although Superbowl ads give you an uptick in traffic, it’s clearly not sustained. Maybe it needs to speak more to its audience (remember, women buy cars too). For Cars.com’s sake, hopefully next year we will not hear another lofty tale of a man empowered by knowledge or we may hear the sound of money falling on empty seats.

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