Digital Marketing Blog

Let the Social Media Super Bowl Games Begin

Tweet

 

What ever happened at last year’s Super Bowl is guaranteed to be different this year. To begin with, the winner won’t be the same, now that the N.Y. Giants have defeated the defending champs Green Bay Packers.

But who cares about the actual game – it’s the commercials that really count, and already things are changing especially in the area we’re most interest in – the online world.

The Playing Field

On January 3, NBC announced that it had sold out its Super Bowl ad inventory.  Selling out is not really news. Even if a sponsor decided to back out at the last minute, there is a waiting list.

The average cost for a 30-second spot this year is $3.5 million, with some time slots costing as much as $4 million. That’s up from $3 million a spot last year – a nice 16% to 33% increase. But increasing the price is not really new either. Two years ago the price tag was $2.7 million.

Increased Online Attention

What is new is the increased emphasis in online marketing.

• Online streaming. This year, NFL.com and NBCsports has teamed up with Verizon Mobile to provide free live streaming of all the NFL Playoffs and the Super Bowl XLVI 2012 on Mobiles Via the Verizon Wireless NFL Mobile apps.  That’s a huge recognition of the power of mobile. It also means that you don’t have to miss any of the game if you show up late at a Super Bowl party.
• Commercials are already going viral.  Many videos were submitted to Doritos for its 2012 Crash the Superbowl ad Contest.  So what about the ones that did not make the finals? Doritos put some online and within a week one of them got over two million views.  That’s good publicity for Doritos, good for the producers of the video, and increases the level of expectation for the actual winning videos. But the big winner is social media. (Check out the video below that's got more than 2 million hits.)

Super Bowl Social Brand Scoreboard Report

Last year we introduced the Super Bowl Social Brand Scoreboard Report, in which we measured the impact that Super Bowl ads had on:

• The social marketing efforts of those brands that advertised during the game
• The search behavior that occurred after the Super Bowl. 

We measured several key performance indicators such as:

• Facebook Likes/Fans
• Twitter Followers and Mentions
• YouTube Views and Ratings
• Social Bookmarks
• Social Mention Reach, Passion & Frequency

There were some clear social media winners last year  - BMW, PepsiCo (Doritos and PepsiMax), GoDaddy, Volkswagen (Beetle and Passat), Chrysler, CarMax, Bridgestone, Kia, Focus and Disney.

The question we have is can they repeat, or are they the equivalent of this year's Green Bay Packers? And as a side bar question, when all is said and done which Dorito commercial will get the most views – the “official” winners or the ones that never made it to the TV screen?