In more Super Bowl ad-related news, a friend of mine who works with the Emerging Media Research Council sent the company’s “Digital Analysis of Super Bowl XLV” over to me yesterday.  The EMRC’s digital review of this year’s Super Bowl commercials highlighted notable firsts and onlys: Audi was the first company to advertise a Twitter hashtag (#ProgressIs), and CarMax was the only brand that communicated its Web, Facebook and Twitter monikers. Check out the Audi and CarMax ads below. EMRC also mentioned that a total of eight ads pointed to companies’ Facebook pages. 

Wait, only eight?  Does this surprise anyone else?  For all the hype that has been building around social media over the last year, wouldn’t you think that every commercial would promote a company’s social media presences on Facebook, or Twitter or YouTube?  At a going rate of $3 million for 30 seconds of ad time, this seems like a missed opportunity for companies who have put serious effort into developing their social presence.  As journalist Steve Allan said, “It seems the integration of social media campaigns with those of traditional media is still in the early adopter stage.”