Advertising Smackdown - Oscars vs. Super Bowl... Part I

While last night's Oscars provided few surprises in terms of the statues awarded - Kings Speech, yadda, yadda, yadda...  it did provide an interesting look into advertising strategy, as it is sometimes referred to as the "Super Bowl for women."

There is a whole lot of icky feeling and stereotyping in such a label - but I'll deal with that another time.  I'll also want to take a look at some of the advertisers who may have ran ads during both events, to illustrate different strategies for different audiences, etc...  Here, I wanted to take a quick look at the ad rates and the audiences to see which advertisers scored more bang for their buck.

The stats are plain - the Super Bowl outpaced the Oscars in both audience and ad rates:

Of course, the two are correlated (typically) - higher audiences yield higher ad rates.  It makes sense.

The Super Bowl may be more expensive in terms of price tag, but was it as efficient at delivering the audience?  Was it a good deal?

For this we have to calculate something [like] a CPM - the Cost Per Thousand of traditional print media quantification.  It's not a perfect match when shifting to Television, but it does give us some idea of how efficient the Super Bowl and/or the Oscars were at delivering audiences.

CPM is calculating by dividing the Ad Cost by the Audience and multiplying that by 1,000.  It tells us, literally, the cost to reach 1,000 people.

[Avert your eyes if math scares you]

Oscars - $1.7million Ad Cost/37.6 Million Viewers X 1,000 =  $45.21
Super Bowl - $3 million Ad Cost/111 Million Viewers X 1,000 = $27.27

So, the Super Bowl wins in efficiency too...  I, of course, am overlooking a BIG POINT here that might change the results.  What is it??