Social Media Super Bowl Countdown - The NFL

It’s not surprising that the NFL is taking the opportunity to promote itself on the Big Game! And since it owes its success to loyal football fans, bringing them into the process of selecting the NFL ad, as they have done for the last 2 years, seems entirely reasonable. They call that their Super Ad. This year they’ve added a Super Fan ad contest to the mix.
I checked the NFL ad site today (for the first time; I’m not a follower) and found that the voting was closed and both were being turned into the actual ads for airing on the Super Bowl (the lead time issue I talked about last week). The Super Fan, the “how I see it” ad is being sponsored by Samsung. I don’t see any sponsorship of the NFL’s own ad, which makes sense.
If you’re really at a loss for something to do this weekend, you can see all the videos on each part of the site, one for each of the NFL teams and it looks like maybe 75 videos for the “fan story.” That page opened on a guy with a viking helmet and a purple face shouting about something. That did it for me; who watches all of these???

Or if you want another use of your time between now and the Super Bowl, Ad Age has running coverage organized for you; that’s a nice way to make something easy for readers and goodness only knows there’s plenty of coverage to archive.

The NFL or any other business depends on its customers. Engaging them, bringing them into the process, makes sense. The NFL seems to like the results, having gone from one social media effort in 2007 and 2008 to two such efforts in 2009. Like Doritos, have they figured something out?