Social Media And The Super Bowl – A Match Made In Heaven

From Simply Zesty:

It is the marketing equivalent of the world cup final. Companies that run ads during the showpiece final of American Football – the Super Bowl – in January 2011 will pay up to €3m for the privilege of a 30 second slot, and all the ad spots on Fox television have already been sold.

Why? because 100m people watch this event. In fact, last year 106.5m people watched the Super Bowl – this broke the 27 year old record in the for the most viewed TV programme . That was the last episode of M*A*S*H by the way.

What’s interesting is the increasing use of social media by Super Bowl advertisers to try and establish relationships with consumers that last beyond the 30 second ad slots. Mercedes-Benz is running “The World’s First Twitter-Fueled Race,” which awards two new cars to the two-person team of social-media users that get Mercedes-Benz the most tweets, Facebook “likes” and social-media currency by the day of the Super Bowl.

“We’re using the 2011 Super Bowl as our head-long plunge into committing to social media,” says Stephen Cannon, marketing vice president at Mercedes-Benz. “It’s our strategic leap of faith.” Besides rolling out new models in the game, in the next few years Mercedes plans to create cars targeting a much younger demographic, Cannon says. It wants to be much more social-media savvy long before that, he says.

Audi is in its fourth Super Bowl as an advertiser, will host an Audi Inner Circle which is social-media contest open to everyone. Audi will reward its 10 “most active” social-media fans before the Super Bowl. It will award trips and other prizes to the fans whose social-media posts are most original and most numerous. “We’re trying to use social media to glue everything together,” say Scott Keough, chief marketing officer at Audi of America

This represents a growing trend of major sporting events and social media coming being used together by major traditional offline advertisers. During the Beijing Olympics TV advertisers like Procter &Gamble used Twitter and Facebook to extend the reach of their TV campaign.

The FIFA World Cup saw brands like Nike and Adidas aggressively cross-promote TV pieces to their Facebook pages. Brands are using Social Media to try and build relationships after the ads have been shown, to determine how well the ads were received and to drive additional traffic to Facebook so they can engage with consumers (which they can’t do on TV).

Advertisers are also using Social Media to generate engagement and interaction before the event to reach a wider audience. Last year, for example Budweiser asked facebook users to decide which ads they would run in the Superbowl. While there, they could also vote for their favorite Bud ad from previous years. After users voted (having become a fan first), they were given the option of posting their selection to their own Facebook Wall.

And a step further went Pepsi – who dropped their advertising in the Superbowl to run a huge $20m social media campaign instead. They are back advertising in this year’s Superbowl. But guess what, they are getting their consumers to create their own superbowl ads with the finalists being voted on by the public to decide which ads are run. How Social Media is that!