Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

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>This has always bugged me. $7 million for a 30-second-long ad. What do they get out of it?

Super Bowl ads are about brand building. They're not conversion ads. Their direct impact is to reduce CPC (cost per conversion) on other advertising.

Say you have to pay $100 per instagram conversion. Users see your ads cold and need a lot of convicing. Most won't pay attention long enough for your ad to convert. You need them to see a lot of ads.

But after they've seen your brand plastered all over the Super Bowl (and other brand opportunities), those same instagram ads might start converting at $90 per conversion. Users see your ad and go "Oh yeah I remember that brand, lemme check this out"

The brand effect is so strong that displaying a Visa (or Mastercard or Amex) logo near checkout literally increases consumer spend. Study from 1986: https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/13/3/348/18224...

Another study from 2015 showing that credit card logos increase estimates of item value: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Effect-of-Credit-Card-...

> Another study from 2015 showing that credit card logos increase estimates of item value

Notably, the abstract of the 2015 study specifically points out that the 1986 study has frequently failed to replicate, and although it finds an effect, the 2015 study has n = 28. As always with psychology studies, we would do well not to assert their purported findings as facts, as with the statement "The brand effect is so strong that displaying a Visa logo near checkout literally increases consumer spend". Psychology as a field is far too unreliable to make such assertions with confidence.

Not able to replicate an earlier study doesn’t mean that study is wrong. More likely that the assumptions and factors taken into consideration have changed, especially after almost 30 years. The pull of Visa brand may have declined, but the effect may be as strong or even stronger if it was replaced with, says, Apple.

I didn't say that it was wrong. I said that the field is murky and not suitable for such confident declarations of fact. "Putting a credit card logo on your checkout stimulates spending" is a very different sentence than "An experiment on 130 restaraunt customers and 150 college students found credit card logos stimulated spending among the people tested", and it is abundantly clear that sentences of the latter type do not reliably generalize to entire populations, because humans are ridiculously complex and it is somewhere between very hard and impossible to accurately control for all possible confounding factors. Do they sometimes generalize? I'm sure they do, but there are also times they don't, but the general populace treats them as though these experiments always do generalize reliably and allows them to influence their thinking and discussion of issues to an unearned degree. Such studies can be useful evidence towards a claim, but they are not proof of a claim.

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