TV Ad Spend Weekly: Google Home takes it to the Max in Olympics closing week
Brands continue to invest heavily in above-the-line content, and television is still seen as the place brands want to be. Each week, in partnership with Kantar Media, The Drum looks at which brands have been investing the most on newly-launched creative on US national broadcast and cable TV.
Google Home goes for "max"-imum effort in Olympic ad spend this week. / Google
The Winter Olympics took the gold for new TV ad spending for the third week in a row. New commercials airing during the games accounted for 34 percent of all new national expenditures during the week of February 19th, reaching $43 million. Overall, spend for commercials making their national TV debut remained flat from the previous week at $129 million.
Netflix and Warner Bros, not surprisingly with the Oscars this Sunday and blockbuster season inching closer, pushed out a cool few million each to get people in front of screens. Netflix specifically is spending heavily on critically-acclaimed series Marvel’s Jessica Jones (perhaps riding the momentum of a box office hit and darling amongst critics in Black Panther).
Old Navy is entering the list for the first time this year, warming the Olympic audiences up for summer with its new jeans collection. Only 600k was spent on the Olympics, which is fair for the closing week of competition, and a sign that the rest of the 5mm spent was to cast a wide net of viewers.
McDonald's, although no longer an official sponsor of the Olympic Games, spent like one this week, spending 3mm of its 15mm budget during the PyeongChang games coverage.
In the seemingly never ending battle from tech brands selling the latest connected home device, this week Google spent $5 million to promote the newest addition to the Google Home family – the Google Home Max.
Though the device launched towards the end of last year, advertising for the Google Home Max didn’t begin until late January 2018. Ad spend initially began low, reaching a weekly average of $0.5 million. This week, Google upped its promotion by increasing expenditures tenfold and placing ads mainly during broadcasts of the highly coveted Olympics.
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This data is part of ongoing reporting released on a weekly basis with Kantar Media using its AdScope tool.