GM drops Super Bowl ads

The annual Super Bowl ad breaks very February are among the most-watched, most viral and most expensive in the world, with 2013’s 30-second spots selling for up to $3.8 million — a rise of 9 per cent over 2012’s $3.5m spots, and 59 per cent since 2001’s price of $2.2m.

GM is the third-largest Super Bowl advertiser, behind Anheuser-Busch beer and Pepsi, and leads auto spend for the spots with a total of about $82 million over the past 10 years, despite sitting out the 2008-2010 games through the GFC and bankruptcy proceedings.

It made a return in 2011 and a big impact this year with five ads, including one that took swipes at Ford and sparked an online flaming session between the two brands and their fans.

The ad for Chevrolet’s Silverado pickup truck implied it would outlast a Ford – and that the Chevy trucks and their owners would be the only things to survive an apocalypse.

The furore about the ad went well beyond the Super Bowl’s 111.3m record audience, reaching another 7.5m on Youtube and possibly double that in email and forum traffic.

"We understand the reach the Super Bowl provides, but with the significant increase in price, we simply can't justify the expense," GM chief marketing officer Joel Ewanick said in a brief  media statement.

If follows his marketing announcement early last week that GM would pull its $10m spend on paid Facebook advertising it deemed ineffective, but retain the remaining $30m it spends on marketing content on the social media site.

The announcement, made just days before Facebook’s highly-publicised public stock offering on Friday, was seen as an early sign that GM is shaking up its advertising and marketing approaches, with more announcements possible as it streamlines and repositions its spend.

The Detroit icon spent about $3.9 billion in global advertising in 2010, with $2.8b of that in the US and the remaining $1.1b scattered around more than 150 countries in which it does business.