People love dissecting the much-hyped Super Bowl commercials, picking each year's winners and losers. But there is always one clear winner when it comes to advertising sales revenue: the local affiliate station of the network airing the big game.
This year, that good fortune belonged to NBC affiliate WGRZ-TV. The station was allotted time for about 15 local in-game commercials, as well as another five that aired during the pregame programming and after the game was over.
"What's cool about the Super Bowl is so many people pay more attention to the ads than the actual game," said Jim Toellner, the station's president and general manager. "So engagement for advertisers is like no other event."
Unlike during regular viewing hours, Super Bowl advertisers don't have to worry about the audience drifting away to other media.
Since viewers usually watch the Super Bowl live in groups, advertisers don't have to worry about viewers them tuning commercials out in favor of the Internet or fast-forwarding through them on their DVR.
Roughly 52 percent of local households were tuned to WGRZ for the game -- a number that rises to about 70 percent when you add the number of people who were watching the game at a party or restaurant, Toellner said.
"When it comes to the Super Bowl, agencies and advertisers realize what an engaged experience this is and will value it higher than just its rating," Toellner said. "Every year it gets bigger and bigger."
That translates into dollars for the host station.
Toellner declined to say how much advertisers paid to advertise locally, but he said the spots cost up to seven times more than those that would air during the station's highest-rated program breaks. Outside sources pegged the 30-second ads at $12,000 to $17,000.
"We set prices, and people have been more than willing to pay," Toellner said. "Some will package it and buy spots during the pregame show or during the news after the game to bring their average cost down."
Spots were parcelled up into asranged from as brief as four seconds ("Long enough to get a company's name and slogan out there," Toellner said) and to as long as 60 seconds. The majority of advertisers bought 30-second chunks of time.
WGRZ saved 60 seconds of airtime for a commercial of its own -- a decision that seems to be paying off.
The inspirational commercial, set to the Goo Goo Dolls' song "Better Days," showed various Buffalo landmarks interspersed with vignettes of Western New Yorkers and ended with an encouragement to "start believing in better days."
It may have been one of the most memorable local or national spots of the night. It has generated a lot of buzz locally and elicited high praise in hundreds of comments on the station's Facebook page.
"Fantastic Commercial. Very Proud when everyone at Elmwood Lounge clapped after seeing this," wrote one viewer.
WGRZ began selling Super Bowl ads about six months ago and had sold all the available spots a month before the event.
Demand was much higher this time around. The last time the Super Bowl aired on NBC was in 2009, during the thick of the recession.
"We definitely sold out faster than in 2009, which is a reflection of the economy at the time," Toellner said. "We were selling spots right up until the last couple of days."
Higher demand and higher prices may be a boon for WGRZ, but what about the companies paying for the spots? Are the ads worth it?
"There are a great deal of metrics that can be used, but it depends on what the brand values and what they do with that information," said Charlie Riley, president of the Advertising Club of Buffalo.
Many advertisers added Twitter hashtags to their commercials hoping to keep a conversation alive via social media and get more mileage out of the pricey spots.
Driving traffic to the Web with social media sites and mobile downloads helps companies keep better track of their return on investment.
"These are all trackable things, with metrics for clicks, downloads, sentiment onconversation," Riley said.
After all, the trend in marketing today is to target hyper-specific audiences that meet a product's prime demographic.
But with the Super Bowl, it's a game of sheer numbers. The value comes from the high number of viewers and their overall diversity. This year's viewership set a record as the most watched television show in history, with 111.3 million viewers.
And with so much competition, local ads can get lost in the shuffle among giant corporations with multimillion-dollar production budgets.
"In most cases, it's probably even harder for local spots to stand out, given the expectations of the audience," said Jeff Herberger, creative director at Travers Collins. "When these other companies have super high production values it can be harder to compete."
But at the same time, it's one of the few occasions advertisers have to reach a willing and captive audience.
"This is when people expect to be sold to. They're prepared -- they're not going to change the channel," said Jordan Hegyi at EMA. "No other time of the year can you know they're going to sit and watch your commercial."
The clip is a video montage of the people & sights of Buffalo. 
