I love football. I have since I was a kid growing up in a small town in Colorado playing pickup ball with the neighborhood boys and rooting for John Elway leading the Denver Broncos to back-to-back Super Bowls in the late 90’s. Speaking of the Super Bowl, most of us know that this year’s big game has come and gone, and that always leads to a sad time of year for me when there is no football to watch. So I wanted to go back a couple months and revisit football season to see what type of TV assortment was advertised leading up to this year’s championship game.
The four weeks leading up the Super Bowl are always a big time for TV advertisements as manufacturers and merchants try to entice fans around the country to upgrade their sets for the most popular sporting event of the year. Furthermore, according to gap intelligence TV Analyst Deirdre Kennedy, this time of year is also important because “as the annual selling cycle draws to a close, the Super Bowl presents an opportunity for one last push to get last year’s merchandise out the door before new models begin arriving on the shelves in March.”
Below are some of the trends from this year’s Super Bowl ads from January 6 through February 2, the day before the game. Of the 488 ads we recorded, what manufacturers offered the most ads? How about which merchant? What was the most advertised screen size? How many more 4K TVs were advertised than other resolutions? Let’s find out!
Note: The data includes printed retail circulars and the dot.com counterparts. Online banner ads are not included.
Ads by Brand
Not surprisingly, the manufacturer who had the most ads during this time was industry leader Samsung. With nearly 200 ads in the four week span they nearly doubled LGs next highest count of 104. Sony had a notable 61 ads, followed by TCL, Insignia and Vizio all coming in in the 20s.
Following the same trend, when breaking down the ad counts by week, Samsung led every week. Also of note, most of the manufacturers, especially the top three of Samsung, LG and Sony, started a little slow with ad placements but came on quite a bit heavier in the final two weeks.
Ads by Merchant
Similar to there being a run-away leader in the Brand ad counts, retailer Best Buy posted far more ads than any other merchant in our panel. With 191 ad placements, they had more than twice the amount of second place Frys Electronics. PC Richard, RC Willey and Target rounded out the top five.
Ads by Screen Size Range
Over half of this year’s Super Bowl ads contained TVs ranging from 50-69”. The 50-59” size range led with 29% leaving the 60-69” range to account for 24% of all ads. The 40-49” and 70-79” ranges combined for 31% of the ads released, showing that although those two size ranges aren’t the most popular, the still merchants still contributed a fair amount of ads to them. The more extreme size ranges didn’t see a whole lot of ad exposure with TVs under 40” and over 80” accounting for only 14% of Super Bowl ad placements this year.
Ads by Screen Resolution
These days, if you don’t have a 4K TV you are kind of behind the times (and I’m guilty as charged). After all, you can find a 50” 4K TV for as low as $228 and they account for nearly 75% of all TVs that have debuted in gap intelligence’s data in the past 12 months. That being said, it is not shocking that 85% of the TVs advertised during the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl had a 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160.
I have been thinking about upgrading my sad non-4K TV for a long time now. I think the charts above confirm it’s high time I start saving for a trip to Best Buy next January to purchase a new 65” 4K Samsung TV for Super Bowl XXXIV in 2020. And I’m sure there will be plenty of options to choose from when I open up the retail circulars.
For more than 16 years, gap intelligence has served manufacturers and sellers by providing world-class services monitoring, reporting, and analyzing the 4Ps: prices, promotions, placements, and products. Email us at info@gapintelligence.com or call us at 619-574-1100 to learn more.
