It was Super Bowl XLVI last Sunday and probably one of the best Super Bowls that I had the privilege of watching. As for the ads that are always important, we had Clint Eastwood’s halftime commercial that I liked, Deion Sanders making an appearance in his du-rag with Troy Aikman for a Bridgestone ad and of course Danica Patrick for Go Daddy.

I was actually taking a marketing class back in college when I read that a 30-second ad costs a whopping $3.5 million. How this is even feasible from an economics standpoint was what was foremost in my mind. The sellers of the ads like this year’s home of the Super Bowl television network NBC seem to think that $3.5 million is a bargain from the research they have done looking at company stock prices, sales, etc after the Super Bowl.

I mentioned GoDaddy which I always liked and it is also a remarkable Super Bowl commercial success story. It actually had only 900 servers and then when it aired its first Super Bowl ad it had to expand and now has over 36,000 servers and facilities across the globe. Looking again at the GoDaddy example, the market share before the ad run was 16 percent and a week after the Super Bowl it was 25 percent.

I know most people watch the Super Bowl for the commercials and even the halftime show and so this justifies the intrinsic value of $3.5 million for a 30 second ad. Many marketing and advertising experts actually feel that it should be worth more if every ad spot was auctioned.