Sunday night’s Super Bowl XLIII may have been one nail-biting ordeal of a football game, but it produced few real surprises in terms of the advertisers who did the best job of leveraging their expensive broadcast spots with additional online content or marketing.
According to Reprise Media, the search and social media subsidiary of the Interpublic Group, only about two-thirds of the brands that ran spots during Sunday’s big game bought pay-per-click search ads against either their brands or their specific products.
While 95% of advertisers were visible on the Web through organic search—that is, showing up naturally on search results pages in Google and Yahoo—just a shade more than two-thirds of those advertisers were buying search ads to make sure people found those sites.
That constitutes a missed marketing opportunity, says Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise. “Advertisers spent $3 million for 30 seconds of air time plus the cost of production,” he says. “There’s an opportunity to extend the life of these assets online through search and social media. I don’t know that people are going to get your message just by watching the spot during the game.”
This year more than ever before, Super Bowl ads are being syndicated around the Web, on YouTube and on USAToday.com but also on Hulu.com and many smaller video aggregator sites. “You’ve got all those commercials out there now, and they exist on a number of Web sites, not just in one place,” Hershberg says. “I’d say that’s one of the biggest changes we’ve seen since we started doing the scorecard in 2005.”
It’s also a good reason marketers should be making sure to direct visitors to their branded site with their message, rather than handing them off to a Web site without branding—or worse, to one where they might watch that Super Bowl spot while taking in a rival’s brand message.
According to Hershberg, the companies that did the best integrated marketing around their Super Bowl spots were predominantly Web-centric advertisers, including ETrade, CareerBuilder.com, GoDaddy.com and Cash4Gold.com, a first-time Super Bowl entrant. These companies including a clear call to action in their ads, provided value-adds in the form of extra content rewards to visitors who found them on the Web and in social networks, and helped that happen by means of paid search ads.
A large number of consumer brands failed to convert by leaving search marketing out of their integrated campaigns, Hershberg says. These included Gatorade, which used the game to reposition its sports-drink brand, and Doritos, which again ran a promotion to find a user-generated Super Bowl commercial but then failed to run paid search campaign helping people find it on the Web.
“That was especially tough because the Doritos commercial was hidden online behind a vanity domain, www.snackstrongproductions.com, which had nothing to do with the brand and no way for people to find it,” Hershberg says.
And some of the brands running ads in Sunday’s game barely got up off the Astroturf in terms of leading viewers smoothly from the TV screen to the monitor screen. Hershberg cites Taco Bell, a handful of entertainment properties and the Denny’s restaurant chain for particularly poor execution.
“They had no paid search, and their ad had no clear call to action,” Hershberg says. “The bigger issue for them, however, was that they were completely unprepared to have people come to visit their Web site. They actually didn’t put their site live until right after the commercial aired during the game, and the Web site promptly crashed and no one was able to access it.”
“Here was a company that seemingly had their act together, but still thought they’d be able to just flip a switch during the game and suddenly accept all that traffic,” he says.
Finally, Hershberg says he was surprised by the number of beer ads that were not integrated with search marketing. Since the last super Bowl, search titan Google has loosened its former sanctions on using pay-per-click ads to drive search traffic to age-restricted alcohol sites.
Nevertheless, Hershberg points out, big-game veteran brands Budweiser, Bud Lite and Heineken did nothing to extend the visibility of their commercials with search marketing.
Network
