Yesterday saw the 45th annual Superbowl in the USA - the culmination of a great season of American Football. One of the biggest sporting events in the US and in fact the world's calendar.
Not being a huge sports fan...and being English...meant that the sports side of it didn't interest me too much. What did interest me was the Marketing side of it.
There has been huge buzz running up to the event and a lot of what I had heard wasn't even about the sport - it was about the advertising space. The commercial breaks during the annual match have one of the highest advertising premiums anywhere. Companies signing up for the advertising space are rumored to pay in the region of $100,000 per second – so an average 30 second advert costs up to $3m.
That’s big bucks – but spending that money during what is THE most watched program in the United States, with an average of 80 million viewers at any one time, means guaranteed exposure for any brand lucky enough to secure advertising space.
Many of the products advertised were the usual suspects – drinks, snacks and automobiles. Celebrity endorsement was a popular choice to build the popularity of certain brands – Eminim, Ozzy Osbourne, Joan Rivers, Justin Beiber, Rosanne Barr, Faith Hill to name but a few. Given the cost of the advertising space and the popularity, most of the slots were short 20 or 30 second adverts, meaning the challenge was on to fit entertainment, messaging and brand into a short space. Most succeeded, and I’m sure some were using the Superbowl as a platform to launch new campaigns, which will most likely cross into multi channels in the coming weeks.
I was surprised to see a Salesforce.com commercial pop up. I think this was the only B2B focused advert I saw, to promote their Chatter application. They cunningly channeled cartoon versions of the Black Eyed Peas (the Superbowl halftime show entertainment) to open up the Salesforce communication tool to the masses.
One of the best commercials I saw yesterday was for the Volkswagen Passat. The ad features a pint-sized Darth Vader, trying to use the force on inanimate household objects, finally succeeding when he discovers the all-new 2012 Passat parked outside the house. It’s funny, emotional and effortlessly cool.
VW were clever with this advert – they realized that a vast majority of the viewing public were going to be watching the Superbowl in groups of people, who may not be concentrating 100% on the TV during the ad breaks and needed something that would make people stop and watch. They used one of the unforgettable iconic tunes from the Starwars movies (which I now can’t get out of my head!) and they deliberately didn’t use voiceover or dialog – to make it simple yet effective.
The most effective thing VW did was to ‘leak’ the commercial a few days before the Superbowl slot to create a viral following. Social networks went mad for it – Twitter, Facebook…all leading to YouTube to see the advert. Meaning that when the official advert screened during the Superbowl, people stopped to take notice, because they’d seen it or heard about it previously and loved it – and wanted to watch it again – and show their friends. Genius.
All the Superbowl adverts are now benefitting from the viral effects of social media, whether positive or negative – a quick Google this morning, and I can see all the adverts online, whether on NFL related websites, news pages, Facebook updates or Twitter comment. Compared to where media was 10 years ago, I’m sure the power of social media marketing in 2011 has allowed the Superbowl advertisers to benefit from a much extended reach – and hopefully recouped some ROI from the huge advertising spend!