February 8th, 2011
Posted by Colin Hogan

It’s the week after Super Bowl Sunday and the annual commercial evaluations are well under way. But this year, the conversation involves much more than the TV spots themselves. The high cost of running media during the Super Bowl this year is making advertisers look beyond just TV impressions. And with the continuing rise of online video and social media, there are plenty of other outlets to maximize the number of eyeballs on your brand. Here are a few of the tactics that we saw in play on Sunday.

Viral Videos

One of the biggest opportunities to have a branded video go viral is during the Super Bowl. By releasing a spot at the big game, you’re automatically entering yourself into the biggest public advertising conversation of the year. This guaranteed word of mouth spreads your videos even further than the initial impressions during the game.

Until recently, the culture around Super Bowl advertising was tight-lipped to preserve the element of surprise for game day. This year, however, advertisers’ efforts to make their spots spread online began well before the weekend. Pre-game spot releases and teasers have become more popular to capitalize on the pre-game buzz. As AdAge’s John King calls it, “The explosion has been replaced by the fuse.”

Doritos has been using this strategy for years, with its annual “Crash the Super Bowl” crowd-sourcing contest to select the brand’s Super Bowl spots. Each year, Doritos receives hundreds of submissions, which are narrowed to ten. Although the final list of the three spots that will air during the game is kept secret, all the spots are available online beforehand. The Doritos campaign has received lots of buzz online well before Sunday, aided by the company’s PR efforts.

Other brands have followed suit this year: Volkswagen released its “Force” spot a week before the Super Bowl and received 12 million views – all before kickoff. Chevrolet released all five of its spots on its YouTube and Facebook pages during the week before.

Budweiser and our client, Bridgestone, took a similar approach by releasing teasers of their spots the week before Super Bowl Sunday.

Because these advertisers released their spots earlier, they will have a much better search presence when viewers look for Super Bowl spots during the game, because they will have already gained traction.

Social Contests

Some brands are looking to more actively engage their consumers before and after the Super Bowl spots themselves. This is an opportunity to use social media to continue to involve people. For this year’s Super Bowl, Mercedes announced a “Tweet Race,” where four teams of Mercedes fans embarked on a cross-country journey to Dallas for the Super Bowl. Over a three-day period, they earned points by generating “TweetFuel” from other fans and by their performance on a series of social-media-related challenges along the way. The team that reached the finish line with the highest total score was declared the winner and received an all-new 2012 C-Class Coupe. Online videos related to the campaign generated more than two million views in January.

The automaker’s competitor, BMW, took a similar approach. After viewing its X3 spot during the game, fans were encouraged to go to Facebook to build a match of the X3 shown during the game. Several clues were given in the spot to help the guessers. Of those who guess correctly, one fan will win a two-year lease of a 2012 X3, and ten fans will win a VIP trip for two to the BMW Spartanburg plant, museum and Performance Driving School.

Mobile

But advertisers aren’t only reaching out to social media in their cross-platform initiatives. Mobile is becoming a player in the Super Bowl as well. In addition to its regular Super Bowl spots, Anheuser-Busch also released an iAd the day after the Super Bowl that featured behind-the-scenes footage, free iTunes downloads and a 24-hour takeover of all iPhone applications accessible to adults 25 and over.

A recent effectiveness study for the iAd, which was funded by Apple and early adopter Campbell’s, showed that in Campbell’s case, those who were exposed to one of Campbell’s iAds were more than twice as likely to recall it than those who had seen a TV ad. The five-week study, conducted by Nielsen, showed that consumers shown an iAd remembered the brand “Campbell’s” five times more often than TV ad respondents and the ad messaging three times more often.

Summary

The trend of advertisers spreading their Super Bowl budgets beyond just television is an important one, but should not be misinterpreted. Social media and online video will never replace the traditional Super Bowl spot; they will only serve to enhance it. The online world is a great place for consumers to engage with Super Bowl advertisers both leading up to and after the big game, but it is still dependent on the event itself: the television spot.