Football’s here! Now about that Super Bowl on Facebook …

As football season gears up again, it’s a good time to consider the relative benefits of broad-based live TV advertising vs. more targeted and distributed digital options. It’s not the black and white comparison that it used to be.

Last year, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg famously commented in an Advertising Week presentation that there is a Super Bowl every day on Facebook (Facebook mobile, to be exact.) Reports of her presentation note that she emphasized how Facebook gives advertisers huge reach as well as targeting capabilities.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":2059781,"post_type":"guest","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,marketing,","session":"D"}']

In a few years, some ads on the Super Bowl could be targeted as well as they are on Facebook.

At the same time, P&G recently announced that it is pulling back from granular targeting on Facebook. Marc Pritchard, P&G’s CMO noted that they targeted too much and went too narrow. As sophisticated as a business may be in creating broad appeal, there are learning curves to targeting at scale, understanding what Facebook users want to experience, and working with Facebook as a key media partner.

As TV starts to become more addressable, advertisers will be forced to compare the pros and cons of TV and digital advertising more directly. Targeting might be good for some messaging, but when is it too much? The Super Bowl may provide a national stage, but is the soaring cost really worth it? When creating a multichannel advertising strategy, it’s important to focus on a few important elements before placing your bets: overhead cost, data accuracy, scale, and fit.

P&G actually did many advertisers a huge favor by announcing that it’s possible to be too targeted on Facebook. The advertising giant famously puts a lot of stock in media measurement and likely quantified the pros and cons of targeting so many individual segments on Facebook. The overhead cost of creating individual campaigns for each segment was likely higher than a more general campaign. The accuracy of data targeting for a consumer packaged goods company on a social media platform was likely imperfect, where third-party data or “proxy” data is used extensively. The scale of targeting is naturally less than a broad-based campaign, and the fit might or might not be appropriate. People may not want to think about buying dog food or toothpaste while looking at their friend’s vacation pictures.

Compare this to P&G’s enormously successful “Like a Girl” campaign during Super Bowl 2015. The ad was for Always feminine products during the middle of the Super Bowl. However, it focused on universal themes, creating an instant conversation among viewers. It also took advantage of digital media, garnering millions of YouTube views as people dug deeper into the campaign’s message. Would the company have caused such a meaningful sensation or won so many awards if it had simply pushed that campaign on Facebook mobile? Likely not, but its approach does show that the role of Super Bowl advertising is more of a tent pole to a richer strategy than a “one and done” opportunity.

This year saw the highest recorded price for a Super Bowl commercial at an average of $4.8 million for a 30-second spot. The Super Bowl provides advertisers with the ideal traditional scenario — a captive live audience watching a large screen with each other. People want to see the ads, talk to each other about the ads, and even replay them on YouTube. In this regard, there really isn’t a comparative advertising opportunity on Facebook, mobile, or anything else.

On the flip side, Facebook does offer a lot of what advertisers like about the Super Bowl. They can achieve scale, they can buy a huge amount of advertising with a relatively simple set of transactions, and they can be confident they are reaching real people in a brand-safe environment.

So while Facebook might have elements of Super Bowl advertising on its platform, advertisers will still have to weigh the costs, scale, data targeting, and fit before determining the best way to spend their money. And while the Super Bowl can cause a sensation across the nation, it takes fantastic storytelling and a rich multichannel strategy to keep the message going. As digital and TV begin to resemble each other, a planning strategy that fairly compares the two (or determines how they can be used together) will create a neutral framework that can unite planners across traditional and digital lines.

[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":2059781,"post_type":"guest","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,marketing,","session":"D"}']

Matt Nitzberg is Chief Growth Officer at ThinkVine.