Super Bowl 2012 is a Social Media Event

I’ve been writing about the role of social media in the Super Bowl for several years. It has included interesting tie-ins with advertising, mostly a lot of contests which have seemed to work for customer engagement even if they’ve produced some less-than-stellar ads (aren’t most of them anyway?).  (See 2011 pre, post, 2010 pre 1, pre 2, post) But this year is different.

Social media has become an integral part of the event. I’ve heard, for example, that players will be able to tweet from the sidelines. They can’t bring their mobiles, but there will be a computer for their use on the sideline. Hope they remember their passwords!

But there are some significant additions to the lineup that should work. The two things that seem most significant are:

• Live streaming of the event. Ad CPMs are high for this audience but a few major advertisers seem to be taking the plunge, although Chevrolet has let it be known that they are advertising on the stream and are working to integrate all their advertising through activities like this promoted Tweet. As many as 300 thousand viewers have watched streamed NFL games this season, so the size of the final audience will be interesting.

• The integrated use of social media by the host committee in Indianapolis. This is their “Get Connected” page. Take a look at the home page also. Its style is rather frenetic, but it makes the point they want the visitor to have an excellent game experience. According to Lisa Arthur writing in the Forbes blog the activities of the host committee include:

  o Integration of on- and off-line experiences. The home page offers event info. If you can’t be there, you might enjoy the live web cams.
  o A social media control center where they can listen to fan chatter and respond in real time. They say on the Twitter page that they are open from 9 a.m. to midnight. With almost 21 thousand Twitter followers and over 15 thousand Facebook likes as of Tuesday morning, they could be quite busy!
  o Collaborated with the NFL on a single mobile app for the event
  o Reached out to influential Indiana bloggers to promote the event activities (there’s plenty to do, and residents can enjoy it without shelling out for a game ticket) and build the social network in advance of game day.

Brad Carlson is vice president of marketing for the host committee. He says:

All of this has evolved into a robust ‘real-time’ network helping us react to trends in fan sentiment, and make adjustments to our plans on the fly. . .This will be the most connected Super Bowl in history. We’re breaking new ground, and laying the benchmarks for the future. . We want the fans to win.

All this reminded me that the London Olympics has already issued social media guidelines for participants. Some coverage describes it as restrictive. I’ve read it, and I’d say they are reminding about standard intellectual property issues and reminding the young participants to play nicely and respect the Olympic brand. Wonder if that' is the reasoning behind not allowing mobiles on the SB sidelines; reduce the likelihood of unfortunate ‘in the heat of the moment’ posts.

So, overall, I’d agree that SuperBowl XLVI is setting new precedent for social media integration into a live event that other events will learn from and emulate.

Article first published as Super Bowl XLVI is a Social Media Event on Technorati.

New on Wednesday - More on the Social Media Command Center

The Super Bowl and New Media--One Last Time

It’s the Monday morning after and most of the pundits are working on Super Bowl ad reviews. My interest was UCG content, and I also watched for ads that were designed to drive traffic to websites.

Of the UCG contests I listed on Wednesday, the only winner actually played during the game was Doritos “Kina: Message from Your Heart.” Doritos introduced it by saying they were offering her a large stage, and as far as I’m concerned she represented the brand better than most of the celebrities that were ubiquitous (obnoxious?) in the agency-produced ads. The Upper Deck winner apparently made it to the game, but not to the advertising slapdown. Hope the KFC winner enjoyed his big party; the players followed league rules and didn’t engage in “hot wings dance”—thankfully. The NFL invited text messages to vote for MVP during the game, not an innovation, but engaging nonetheless.

I found myself watching for ads that were designed to drive viewers to web sites. It reminds me of the golden days of direct marketing in which a classic question was, “If it contains a 1-800 telephone number, does that make it a direct-response ad?” The answer to that is a resounding, “No;” the ad must have an explicit call to action in order for it to be direct response.

The same is true of listing your URL in an ad. It doesn’t qualify as direct-response but it’s still a reasonable thing to do as brand building. The usual suspects—GoDaddy with its teaser on the rejected ad and Sales Genie with its free sales lead offer—have drawn huge traffic in the past and surely did so last night.

The Tide ad in which the interview was disrupted by the talking stain was pretty bad. I took the bait and visited MyTalkingStain.com. Another contest, but this one is fast paced with daily prizes. It’s an application of mashups—pun intended. Another that had a direct call to action, even though I thought the commercial was uninspiring, was Sunsilk shampoo. It turns out that the tie in with the commercial that opened with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe (young women even know who they are?) is a chance to become a “new international icon” by posting your hair-care story on MySpace. Well, maybe. . .

Because I found so little that was inspired or inspiring, my favorite hands-down was "Clydesdale Team.” How can you loose with a goal-oriented horse, a dog, and one of the most inspirational movie themes of all time? The one I disliked most was the first eTrade spot, which ended with the baby throwing up. Appropriate, I thought. It was closely followed by the Coke commercial that parodied political season. Neither James Carville or Bill Frist are particularly appealing personalities and the idea they would bond over a Coke is ludicrous. Actually I agreed with Bob Garfield who didn’t like most of them—does that make me an old curmudgeon? Seriously, Garfield's video has some social commentary worth thinking about in the struggle to be heard over all the advertising noise.

If you missed anything, AdAge has all the spots posted. MSN has them all and a contest to boot. Nielsen will do a webcast on its ad reviews today at noon. And all the rest of us self-appointed pundits will continue to pontificate for some time to come.

But enough’s enough. It’s time to get back to the serious business of a new media age in which our audiences are looking to us for more than the same old thing. For my money, they didn’t find it on the Super Bowl!
Sphere: Related Content

New Media and Super Bowl XLII

Like altogether too many other writers, I started Super Bowl coverage back in October with a post on Frito-Lay’s 2008 contest. I’ve been looking to see what else is going on in the new media arena, and here’s an inventory of what you can watch for during Sunday’s big game.

View the video here.

Ad Age’s list of advertisers for the big game contains many of the usual suspects—Anheuser-Busch, Coke, Pepsi, and FedEx, for example. A-B has a long and illustrious history of Super Bowl advertising, and Bob Lachky’s take on the good, the bad and the difficult decisions is interesting. Some advertisers are returning after a hiatus—Kraft, eTrade and Victoria’s Secret Fall into that category. GoDaddy falls into a category all its own—the most outrageous ad rejected by the network, and again this year it’s getting publicity from people like me even though the ad itself will only air on YouTube. Here are links to a series of Ad Age articles leading up to the big day.

Super Bowl XLII continues a trend begun last year to include user-generated content, although contests and other efforts to drive viewers to websites during the game have taken place for a number of years. My memory is untrustworthy, so I’ll take Neil Perry’s word for the efforts in 2007. In iMedia Connection he lists:
•Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" campaign solicited 30-second commercials from consumers, and two out of thousands of submissions aired during the game. Both spots were voted high up in the "most-liked" polls.
•The NFL asked for ideas or commercial sketches from consumers. NFL produced, filmed and polished the winning idea into the final commercial spot.
•General Motors took a college campus approach with 400+ colleges participating to present their best storyboards and then having an ad agency produce the ad.

Alka-Seltzer also ran another installment of its long-running Plop-Plop Fizz-Fizz contest leading up to Super Bowl XLI. The winning video in this contest was run in the pre-game, so it didn’t make the official list.

This year the participants are:

The Doritos "Crash the Superbowl" site has the three top vote-getters posted. The winner will be announced during the game.

Sports memorabilia manufacturer Upper Deck offered two trips to the game for to the winner of its “Best Celebratory Dance” video contest. 63 (acceptable) videos were submitted and a rather sweet one entitled “Doggy McGuire” was the winner.

Also offering two trips to the Super Bowl is Molson Coors Brewing. Since a grand prize winner has not yet been announced, it looks as if the prize will be awarded for next year. It’s all a bit confusing and you might want to look at the website (multiple statements of age required!) and the contest rules.
Photo contests are a natural for Canon, which has sponsored many over the years. It bills itself as the Official Camera of the NFL and has already announced a contest for Super Bowl XLIII. As far as I can tell Canon doesn’t have an ad buy for Super Bowl XLII. The contest began on January 14 and has its own website but the only way I could find it is through a link on the press release on the Canon USA site. Also a bit confusing.

The NFL, as part of the Sprint NFL Access Tour ran a locally-based video contest. See the Winners tab on the site.

View the colonel's invitation and the winner.

KFC and the “Show Us Your Hot Wings” video contest get my vote as the most creative and the most fun. Here’s the Colonel’s invitation and the winner (I’m not going to explain; you’ll have to watch it for yourself). I think you’ll agree the consumer-created video is far more fun than the Colonel’s, but it was probably planned that way.

If you are not suffering from total Super Bowl fatigue, Nielsen will be using its Hey!Nielsen social network to assess ads during the game. According to the extensive Nielsen Super Bowl overview,following the game its AdWeek magazine will host a discussion of the ads involving bloggers and other new media types. If you’re not totally exhausted, you can visit their media blog or their ad blog.

Personally, I’m tired just thinking about all the energy being expended. I think the good news is that a lot of it is consumer/fan/viewer energy associated with this uniquely American institution!
Sphere: Related Content