Super Bowl Ads: UMD-Smith Marketing Expert Available

Media Alert: Jan. 28, 2014
Attention: Business and marketing reporters and editors 

Marketing professor Roland Rust can comment about content and strategy driving this year’s Super Bowl commercials.

Contact him at rrust@rhsmith.umd.edu  or 301-405-4300.

Rust, Distinguished University Professor and David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing in the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, can expand on why advertisers are paying $4 million per 30-second spot.

“The Super Bowl, with more than 100 million viewers, is about the only opportunity that exists in any advertising medium to attract that large a reach,” he says. “The only competitor is the Olympics.”

Rust also can comment on effective and ineffective strategies.

“Historically, Apple’s 1984 ad worked because it challenged peoples' IBM-centric mindset, while spending at a level not justified by the business' cash flow represents failures," he says. "Such examples are Pets.com and the failed dot coms, or ‘dot bombs,’ of the early 2000s.”

Among the world’s prominent scholars in service marketing, Rust is founder and executive director of two research centers: the Center for Excellence in Service and Center for Complexity in Business. He has served as editor of the top marketing journals, received numerous lifetime achievement awards, and founded the Journal of Service Research and the annual Frontiers in Service Conference.