Every year brands line up to pay for commercial spots in North America’s biggest sporting event – the Super Bowl. According to network host Fox, This year’s Super Bowl had an average of 111.5 million viewers, a record for a US program.
The massive viewer count is why advertisers aren’t afraid to spend. Budweiser is already enjoying the success of their ad. Their “Puppy Love” commercial has gone viral and now has over 43 million views on YouTube.
Chances are, you didn’t have 4 million dollars in the marketing budget for a 30 second Super Bowl ad. However, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t tap into the marketing power of North America’s biggest sporting event.
More brands than ever before turned to Social Media for real-time marketing during the Super Bowl, and with good reason:
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50 million people discussed the Super Bowl on Facebook
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Super Bowl XLVIII generated 24.9 million tweets during the live telecast
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Approximately 58% of TV advertisements used hashtags to engage viewers on social media, up 50% from 2012.
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29 of the world top 100 brand used real-time marketing during the Super Bowl, up from 8 in the previous years
Social media has collided with the gridiron, and Twitter is leading the charge.
Real-Time Marketing Started With A Dunk In The Dark
During last year’s Super Bowl between the San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens, real-time marketing was showcased with Oreo’s spur of the moment tweet during the game’s 30 minute power outage.
It took Oreo’s creative team 10 minutes to make this ad, and they got a huge response. The tweet received 15,888 retweets and 6,476 favourites. Not only did this gain Oreo some serious attention, it changed the perception of marketers everywhere.
People aren’t looking at their TV during commercials, they’re looking at their phones!
2014 Super Bowl Tweets
This year a record number of brands joined the online conversation surrounding the Super Bowl. Oreo decided to sit out the game, but there were a handful of other brands that made their mark on this year’s festivities.
JCPenney – Mitten Mischief
Some say it was juvenile, others innovative, either way, JCPenney received huge brand attention with two tweets that left fans scratching their heads….
Was JCPenney’s social media manager drunk? Other brands, such as Snickers and Coors Light, poked fun at the company with their own brand related tweets.
How could JCPenney possible spin this into a positive? Their next post had an attached picture of a JCPenney marketer tweeting with mittens.
It was a pre-planned social media stunt, which is why this post received mixed reviews from critics. However, the struggling brand still got what it wanted – social media attention.
It will be interesting to see how the tweet impacts sales of their USA Sochi Winter Olympic Mittens.
DiGiorno - Being Funny In The Moment
Forcing tweets should be avoided, JC Penney’s was definitely on the borderline, but this one is just genuinely hilarious.
Digiorno, the frozen pizza company, added a layer of cheesy commentary to the blow-out Seahawks win on Sunday. For those who didn’t watch the game, it was obvious that the Seahawks were the superior team. Twitter ate it up, and Digiorno got some big marketing attention for understanding their young pizza loving audience.
Purell – What Not To Do
The Akron Ohio based hand sanitizer company, Purell, made fun of their hometown team with this tweet that was later removed:
The #Broncos could use a @PURELL refresh moment, because right now they look like the Cleveland Browns
While some people may have got a laugh at the expense of the Browns, passionate Browns fans berated Purell on Twitter, even threatening to boycott the brand.
Purell quickly apologized for their mistakes, but the damage was done. Unfortunately for Purell, there is no sanitizer for bad marketing.
Real-Time Marketing Is Not Exclusive To The Super Bowl
Tweeting during live events isn’t exclusive to the Super Bowl. Take this year’s Grammy Awards for example.
Arby’s, the American fast food chain company, made a comment on twitter about the fashion choices of award winning producer and musician Pharrell Williams.
Again, the tweet was a huge success. It received 70,000 retweets and 40,000 favourites. Even better, Pharrell Williams personally responded. Does it get better than free celebrity mentions?
The Bottom Line
It’s not a reality for most companies to spend mega money on a Super Bowl ad, but every company can use social media. Whether your company should seriously invest in social media is a blog post for another time, but every company whose target market uses social media should consider it. If you monitor what your customers are saying, and listening to online, you can engage them like never before.
Even brands that could afford a Super Bowl Ad decided to focus their attention on social media channels.
Take Esurance for example. They made a commercial to show not during, but immediately after the superbowl. In the commercial, John Krasinski from The Office tells the audience that Esurance will give away the 1.5 million dollars they saved from not playing the commercial during the game.
What was their call to action? Tweet out #EsuranceSave30 and win 1.5 million dollars.
Social media is here to stay. Now it’s our job as marketers to understand how to use it to its full potential (and if businesses need to use it at all).
My next blog post will dig a little deeper into this.
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