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This Year’s Super Bowl Advertising Trends Have Lessons for Us All
February 6, 2008

Super Bowl watchers tend to fall into one of two camps: those who have some emotional stake in the teams playing, and those who just watch the commercials (the latter getting “higher audience than the game” in homes with TiVo, according to Todd Juenger, vice president and general manager for audience research and measurement at the New York office of TiVo). While an evaluation of the game itself is beyond the scope of this article (but could be provided upon request), advertising trends vis-à-vis the Super Bowl have some lessons for marketers in general, and point the way to some key advertising trends the rest of us will be dealing with in the next year. Given that Super Bowl advertising is the most expensive of all ad and marketing strategies (estimated this year at $2.7 million for each 30 seconds of national air time), it is also perhaps the most analyzed of the ad and marketing strategies.

Aside from the perennial propensity for viewers to be offended by Super Bowl ads, perhaps the biggest story coming out of the Super Bowl XLII adfest was the emphasis this year on multichannel marketing, especially search marketing. But only up to a point. Says Mediaweek, in its post-mortem, Tom Brady wasn’t the only player who failed to live up to expectations:

70 percent of Super Bowl advertisers bought some paid search ads on either Google, Yahoo, MSN – up close to 20 percent versus last year.

But:

just 6 percent of advertisers used their 30-second spots to direct viewers to the Web, and the vast majority (93 percent) failed to buy search ads for alternative terms that were related to their ads, such as their spokesperson’s names, slogans or taglines, reported Reprise. Perhaps even more of a blunder these days– according to Reprise, not a single Super Bowl advertiser directed users to their brand’s pages on MySpace, YouTube or Facebook.

A big part of the multichannel marketing effort is the ability to download Super Bowl ads after the fact. In today’s world of DVRs, virtual video, and YouTube, this may not seem like a big deal, but in years past, Super Bowl ads were truly ephemeral, being shown during the game, then disappearing as soon as the game was over, only sporadically turning up as part of a company’s regular ad spots, but more often than not remembered about as well as the losing team. This year, Super Bowl advertisers were counting on viral propagation of Super Bowl ads. Says the New York Times:

Scores of Web sites are offering computer users a chance to watch video clips of the Super Bowl commercials, among them AOL, MSNBC, MySpace, Spike and YouTube.
During the Fox broadcast of the game — watched by 97.5 million viewers, a record for a Super Bowl, data from Nielsen estimated — the announcers twice reminded the audience to “log on to myspace.com” if “you’ve missed any of the Super Bowl commercials.” (MySpace and Fox are owned by the News Corporation.)

Even specialty Web sites are getting into the act. The Huffington Post, at huffingtonpost.com, known for politics, is wooing visitors to a section that offers a look at the “best 2008 Super Bowl ads.”

And three Web sites operated by the automotive expert Edmunds Inc. (edmunds.com, carspace.com and AutoObserver.com) are carrying video clips of and discussions about car commercials from companies like the Audi division of Volkswagen, General Motors, Hyundai Motor America and Toyota Motor.

Monday morning quarterbacks could also go to various sites and vote for their favorite spots. Some advertisers also created specific microsites (special Web sites specifically devoted to a particular ad campaign or commercial), such as the upsettingly named www.mytalkingstain.com created by Procter & Gamble to tie into its Tide to Go stain remover commercial.

Advertisers also launched tie-in ad buys on various Web sites to tie in to their “in-game” ads. Says the Wall Street Journal:

PepsiCo's Pepsi-Cola North America plans to bolster its TV spots with an ad blitz on Yahoo this weekend. Viacom's Paramount Pictures has secured a three-year Super Bowl package with ESPN.com to be the dominant advertiser on the site. Verizon Communications, which has never bought a TV spot for the big game, is sponsoring AOL's Super Sunday Ad Poll, which lets visitors watch and rank the commercials that air during the game. Meanwhile, dozens of advertisers are bidding on search terms related to the Super Bowl through Google.

Social networking is a big part of the media mix, as well:

Some of the sites are hosting, free, the Super Bowl commercials that run during the game. MySpace, which News Corp. owns, is posting all of the commercials broadcast during the game on a special section of the social-networking site at no extra charge to those advertisers. Google's YouTube, Time Warner's AOL and Yahoo are doing the same for their commercial polls. Hosting those commercials helps the sites build viewer traffic, which then allows them to sell more paid advertising.

Mobile marketing was represented, although not to the extent that some mobile proponents would have liked. The Cadillac division of General Motors, for example, encouraged viewers to text their votes for the most valuable player of the game. Other ads also encouraged texting.

And even print was utilized as part of the Super Bowl media mix—companies such as Bridgestone Firestone, Doritos, E*Trade, Under Armour and the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, ran newspaper ads on the Monday following the game to encourage conversation about their ads.

What lessons do this year’s Super Bowl advertisers have for marketers and advertisers in general?

• Marketers increasingly place an emphasis on multiple platforms and media to reach as wide an audience as possible, including, but not limited to, TV, Web, search, mobile, viral, and print.
• In the age of TiVo and online video, there are very few “communal” television events left in our culture that draw massive number of eyeballs at any given time. The Super Bowl is one of those scarce events, but even so, advertisers are focusing less on the “be there or be square” approach to advertising and making it easy to search, play, replay, or forward ads after the fact.
• Media content is less and less about broadcasting to a large, passive populace. Audiences are increasingly interested in being passive consumers of media content; they are actively involved in the dissemination of content, and advertisers are now understanding that they key to successful marketing is to make it easy for users to access, discuss, and pass along ads. The viral propagation of ads is even more important than the one-time “live” viewing of them.
• Extremely expensive ad buys—i.e., the Super Bowl—can be amortized over a variety of related media and by post-game ad propagation.

Granted, it takes marketers with deep pockets to advertise during the Super Bowl, but the strategies those advertisers employ before, during, and after the Big Game have far-reaching implications for advertisers and marketers everywhere, and foretell those trends that the rank and file will need to contend with in the next 12 months...until Super Bowl XLIII.

Posted by Richard Romano on February 6, 2008 | Comments (0)