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.”
Thanks for the mention, Liz.
Hi Liz,
I think you’re thinking about this the wrong way. First, I don’t think what has happened in social media this year could be classified as “hype.” Second, I don’t think that brands that have the budget to buy Super Bowl ads NEED to drive traffic to social channels. And third, these brands have social presences already — NOT having them would have been the “missed opportunity”. I think we need to get out of the mindset of social media being a property we should drive traffic to. I wrote more about it here: http://www.mattshawblog.com/were-wrong-about-social-and-the-super-bowl/
Thanks!
–Matt