There’s more to Super Bowl Sunday than two beastly football teams duking it out. Many people understand it’s the best block of commercials they’re going to see all year.
During Super Bowl 50, the cost of 30 seconds of ad time is a whopping $5 million, according to Fortune. For that kind of investment, they’re literally banking on wowing viewers with their commercials for quick and easy customer conversion. But that doesn’t always happen, which should be concerning, especially if their commercials fall flat for female Bowl viewers - the most active demographic for purchasing and sharing their thoughts on social media.
Instant Census - a Boston startup that’s developed text message survey software - has caught on to these tendencies and it’s planning to let female consumers tell advertisers exactly what they think about the different commercials this year.
Elyse Desmarais, head of marketing and communications at Instant Census, explained:
According to a Nielsen report, 46% of Super Bowl viewers are female. Women also buy and share socially in greater numbers than men on every day of the year, including Super Bowl Sunday, meaning ads with female appeal are the best return on investment for advertisers. Unfortunately, as seen in years past, advertisers do not always keep this important part of their audience in mind.
What is the startup going to do about it? It’s using its text survey technology to get inside the heads of the women watching the Super Bowl this weekend. The company is partnering with female activism organizations, 3% Conference and The Representation Project, to poll 1,000 women for their instant feedback on each ad. But the company isn’t just looking to hear whether women think a commercial was good or bad. It wants to uncover and help women confront advertisers perpetuating gender issues:
By using Instant Census' text message survey technology to survey 1,000 women across America, we'll turn the individual voices of female consumers into a very public, group conversation for advertisers themselves to see and respond to. We and our partners aim for the survey findings to call out advertisers who are promoting gender stereotypes and inequalities in their commercials and praise those who are promoting gender equality and denouncing stereotypes in the public eye.
Results of the polls will be shared in real-time via the Super Bowl Tweetup to initiate an open, public discussion about what’s going on in advertising. Essentially, it’s helping companies, allowing them to fine tune their advertising so it generates the results they want. Desmarais said:
By engaging in more conversations and speaking publicly about gender inequality in advertising, women can continue to create more equality in advertising. Advertisers need to better listen and be more in-tune with their audiences in general...Our text message surveys allow organizations to collect and directly respond to their audiences' feedback in seconds to minutes, meaning they can address potentially damaging issues, such as inequality in advertisements, more quickly than other survey mediums would allow.
And it’s not exclusively meant to call out companies for being gender intolerant. It’s also about giving credit to those that are effectively marketing to women in a positive and constructive way, which is the other side to fixing gender issues.
