Press Release: Superbowl Commercials

What Did Only 4 out of the 68 Superbowl Commercials Have This Year?

(PRWeb) February 6, 2007 -- The answer is that only four of the 68 superbowl commercials this year contained Toll Free Numbers. Bill Quimby, the founder and president of TollFreeNumbers.com, also pointed out that all of them were vanity numbers or numbers with letters that spell things instead of digits, because that makes them much more memorable and is extremely important for branding.

The four commercials that included phone numbers were E-Trade (Getting robbed by your bank) 877-E-TRADE-4, HP (Orange County Choppers) 800-525-MYHP, Flomax (kayaking) 877-4-FLOMAX and E-trade again (1 finger) 877-E-TRADE-4.

This is down from nine commercials last year because some advertisers, even ones with prominent vanity numbers didn't include them in their commercials this year. FedEx for example didn't include 1-800 GO-FEDEX. They also downsized the domain name too, to make it much smaller and less prominent. Even Sprint and T-Mobile, both of which are obviously phone companies, didn't include their toll free vanity numbers.

The Superbowl is all about branding, so it's not really that big of a surprise that the companies spending the millions of dollars to advertise on the Superbowl aren't really looking to create a "direct response" such as sending viewers to their website or get them to call. Maybe it's also partially because the audience is so big that getting even a small percent to call would create a spike that would be difficult to handle.

Whatever the reasons, some Superbowl advertisers seem to have opted not to include their phone numbers and downsized their domain names. At the same time, a few companies have made specialized sites or pages specifically for their campaign, such as SnackStrongProductions.com.

Mr. Quimby explained that noticing vanity numbers is an occupational hazard. He has literally helped tens of thousands of companies find great vanity numbers through his Internet service TollFreeNumbers.com. His business model is very similar to another famous Superbowl advertiser, GoDaddy's, except that instead of domain names, he gets his customers memorable toll free numbers for a one time fee of $49. Unlike regular phone companies, he's not trying to sell the ongoing use of the number, just helping customers get better numbers in ways the big phone companies don't.