Results From My Super Bowl Commercial Experiment

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5 years ago when I started this blog, I had a theory. The theory was that participating in big, broadcast marketing was a bad strategy. And that companies that continued to participate in it would likely see their stock prices fall over time. To test this theory, I selected a group of 6 companies that ran television commercials during that year's Super Bowl and noted their stock prices with the intention of measuring their performance against the S&P 500 index. The 6 companies were Pepsi Co., E-Trade, Anheuser Busch, Coca Cola, Bridgestone and FedEx.

Anheuser Busch was of course acquired by InBev back in 2008 so 5 years later that leaves me with 5 companies to test my theory. Here are the results:

  • The S&P 500 outperformed the mean of the Super Bowl stocks by just over 13%.
  • The S&P 500 dropped 2.2% during this period and the 5 Super Bowl stocks dropped 15.3%.
  • The S&P 500 outperformed 3 of the 5 Super Bowl stocks.
  • Only one stock price increased during the period (Coca Cola by 22%)
  • E-Trade's stock price ell by 83%.

Given the small sample size, I'm not sure the data is all that conclusive. But it certainly doesn't conflict with my theory. So I'll stand by it for now...