Super Bowl commercials can cost as high as $2.6 million. But do they work?

Ad agencies love to compete for artistic awards within their industry and talk about nebulous concepts like “branding”. But most entrepreneurs just want to know one thing.

…Did my advertising make me money?

The problem is that Super Bowl commercials and other television advertising don’t give you an easy way to tell your advertising made money or not.

…But the Internet makes it incredibly simple to know the actual results of each campaign.

Unlike Super Bowl commercials and other television advertising, Internet advertising can connect each advertising source directly with a sale or other action such as a newsletter signup, even if it happens months later. This lets businesses calculate their return on investment for all the advertising they do.

I test and track my own advertising online and, in my experience, approximately 90% of the advertising sources I test fail to produce a profit!

While this makes it sound like businesses can’t make money with advertising, when you test and track over time, you can expand your advertising with profitable advertising sources and quickly dump the money draining ones. After 6 to 8 months of a program like this, you can have 80 to 90% of your marketing producing excellent results.

I believe that Super Bowl commercials are a HUGE waste of time. As younger, Internet-savvy CEOs take the helm of more Fortune 500 companies (or build their own Fortune 500 company which happens often), they will move away from this type of wasteful advertising in favor of Internet advertising where they know the impact of each ad on the bottom line.

Surveys show that more young people people are switching their entertainment time from television to the Internet. How long will it be before multi-million dollar Super Bowl commercials go the way of the dinosaurs?