In today’s digital age, many Super Bowl viewers spent commercial breaks going online to see what other people were saying about the game on Facebook and Twitter. Advertisers are leveraging social media to extend the buzz and reach of their ads, essentially creating a longer lifespan for the most expensive television ads of the year. Global brands such as Coca-Cola to Volkswagen have spent record-breaking sums to secure the most valuable and prime television slots in advertising.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the average cost of a 30-second Super Bowl ad this year: $3.5 million, or about three cents per viewer. This is up from $3 million from last year’s Super Bowl. And this number doesn’t even count the cost to actually create the ad, which can easily run into the millions. So, there definitely be enough ROI to justify the premium being paid.
Social media is the logical way to best capitalize on the combination of sports engagement, the Super Bowl, and the viewer’s desire to share their thoughts and opinions on the game and the commercials in real time. Although there still are questions on how exactly to measure the impact of social media with a consistent, industry-accepted method, companies win when people keep talking about their commercials for days on Facebook and Twitter. This is the power and beauty of the buzz factor.
Companies have fully evolved their Super Bowl marketing strategies to emphasize equal weight on broadcast and social media buzz. The key purpose and call to action of most Super Bowl broadcast spots is to drive folks to socially tweet, like, share or mention their spots.
Frito-Lay is an excellent demonstration of how a leading brand has fully embraced user-generated content to pull in their audience. According to Ann Mukherjee, Chief Marketing Officer at Frito-Lay, “People don’t want to be told what they like; people want to tell you what they like.” It’s no surprise that this strong belief and accurate understanding of the consumer’s mind has generated an extremely effective and engaging campaign. The Doritos “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign challenged fans to submit a Super Bowl-worthy commercial with the top prize of winning cash, working with The Lonely Island and obviously bragging rights of having millions of eyeballs viewing their spots.
PepsiCo announced that its consumer-created Doritos brand commercial “Man’s Best Friend” ranked No. 1 in USA Today‘s annual Super Bowl Ad Meter. The ad’s creator, Jonathan Friedman, earned a $1 million cash bonus prize. TiVo also released this year’s top 10 most engaging Super Bowl commercials and moments based on its anonymous audience research data, and Doritos’ user-created “Man’s Best Friend” commercial took the winning lead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3bqbJduK2w
In addition, Dorito’s consumer-generated “Sling Baby,” created by Kevin T. Willson, scored No. 4 on the Ad Meter.
http://youtu.be/4GIeIpcRv7o
These two consumer-created Doritos ads were among five finalists that were hand picked by the Doritos brand out of over 6,100 total submissions. This year also boasted a record year for the contest as well, with the most consumer-created ad submissions ever and an exceptional level of consumer votes.
Doritos also won Mullen’s “Brand Bowl 2012” based on 400,000 tweets monitored by the Boston ad agency. Doritos was the most effective brand to advertise on the Super Bowl telecast on NBC. Brand Bowl ranks brands based on volume of chatter and positive or negative commentary on Twitter in reaction to their Super Bowl commercials.
What was your favourite Super Bowl commercial this year and what did you think of the Doritos’ consumer-created commercials?