Top 5 Social Media Game Plans for Super Bowl Advertisers

From Mashable:

Imagine you’re an advertiser contemplating spending $3 million or so on a Super Bowl ad. Maybe you’ve never done this before or maybe you do it every year, but at some point, you have to justify to someone — your CEO or maybe a procurement expert at the company — why this is a good idea.

Now imagine there was a cheap way to get a better return on investment on that $3 million. All you had to do was create some kind of buzz before the ad ran on TV. You could do this by running the ad or maybe video related to the ad on YouTube, writing about it on your company blog, premiering the ad on Facebook, or maybe talking it up on Twitter. Or perhaps you could release an app related to the ad around the time of the big game. You could also get fans to actually create a video for you and then have them talk about it via social media channels for months before the game. Or you could run a game of some sort. Or you could do all that stuff at once.

As you can see, there is a confounding array of social media options, and because social media is still so new, few tried-and-true methods. That said, although the social media palate keeps expanding, there seem to be just four basic approaches to social media Super Bowl hyping.

1. Establish a Real-Time Narrative

These days, Frito-Lay starts its Super Bowl push in September. On September 15, the company announced the 2011 version of its Crash the Super Bowl contest, which offers a total of $5 million in prizes. Since 2006, the PepsiCo unit, which markets Doritos, Fritos and other snacks, has been running a contest asking consumers to try to make ads for the company for possible inclusion into the Super Bowl.

At the time, the craze for user-generated content, driven by books like James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, was at its apex. In the 2007 Super Bowl, the NFL and Chevrolet also ran user-generated TV spots. Four years later, Frito-Lay has made user-generated Super Bowl content a big part of its brand essence. But, while few advertisers have followed Frito-Lay’s lead on UGC, the idea of creating a social media narrative leading up to the Super Bowl has found more currency.

Frito-Lay’s plan, which requires would-be commercial creators to upload their videos onto a dedicated website and asks consumers to vote on the ads, provides more or less constant social media chatter leading up to the big game. After the initial announcement, there was a period from September 27 to November 15 in which consumers could upload videos. The company announced 10 potential ads (for a total of six slots, though fans only choose four — execs from Frito-Lay and Pepsi pick the other two) in early January and then holds off on announcing the winners until the game.

Another advertiser using the real-time narrative approach is Mercedes, which this year is running what it’s calling “The World’s First Twitter-Fueled Race.” The campaign, run via the brand’s Facebook page, sought four two-person teams to race from February 2 through February 4. The teams, chosen for their Twitter followings, win the race based on how much Twitter activity or “Twitter fuel” they can generate.

2. Turn It Into a Game

Until social media came along, pretty much every ad that ran during the game was a complete surprise. Keeping ads a secret, though, is tougher these days. Witness Lipton Brisk, which had been hyping an unnamed big-name rapper as an endorser in the weeks leading up to the game, but lost all social currency when The New York Post broke the story that, in fact, Eminem was the mystery endorser. Still, there are other ways to get people to tune in for your ad. Some marketers are using their Facebook page and/or Twitter feeds to hype secret messages in ads or to get consumers to guess what the ads will look like.

Anheuser-Busch took the latter approach. The brewer, usually the dominant advertiser during the game, has posted a single still from each of its three spots and asking Facebook fans to guess the plot. The campaign, reminiscent of The New Yorker’s caption contest, will reward users who guess correctly with a fourth, Internet-only spot.

Likewise, Kia this year is running a campaign called “One Epic Contest” around one of its Super Bowl spots. In the week and a half leading up to the game, the car maker invited consumers to “embark on their own adventure” through an online grid-based hieroglyphic game set in an ancient temple that poses four questions. Meanwhile, clues for the game were dispersed into 15-second TV spots, print ads and social media postings. A fifth question will be revealed and answered during the ad. The prize: one of five 2011 Optimas.

3. Release a Tie-In App

Another way to give a Super Bowl ad a life in social media is to create an app based on the ad. This, however, is a little-used approach. In fact, until recently, only one advertiser, CareerBuilder, did this. In 2006, the job search site released Monk-E-Mail, an e-mail program that used monkeys from the company’s ads to convey messages. Though the program was successful and resulted in more than 100 million downloads since inception, CareerBuilder monkeyed with its advertising approach, trying a Survivor theme in 2007 and opting for a user-generated ad last year. This year, the monkeys are back and so is Monk-E-Mail.

But just as CareerBuilder is bringing Monk-E-mail back, the app has a rival. E*Trade has come out with BabyMail, a similar concept that features talking babies from the company’s commercials delivering the messages.

4. Advertise the Ad

The final approach to Super Bowl hyping via social media is to treat the ad almost like a movie opening, by teasing out the content. This can be done a variety of ways. For instance, E*Trade plans to run outtakes of its talking babies ad on its YouTube channel before the game as a sop to fans who can’t wait for the next commercial. Motorola even took the unusual step of getting PR agency Weber Shandwick to create a video on YouTube hyping the company’s upcoming Super Bowl spot for its Xoom tablet PC. GoDaddy also released at least one of its Super Bowl ads on its company website before the game, but the ad, featuring Jillian Michaels and Danica Patrick, is designed to hype another GoDaddy Super Bowl spot.

If an ad for an ad sounds a bit insular to you, consider that all the social media outreach techniques outlined above basically perform the same function.

5. Just Throw It on YouTube

This is the first year that advertisers en masse put their complete Super Bowl ads online well before the game. For Volkswagen, this was a smart tactic. The company’s “The Force” ad featuring a pint-sized Darth Vader got 1.5 million views on YouTube in the first 48 hours or so of posting and was a trending topic on Twitter. Two days before the Super Bowl spots are set to air, Hyundai, Coca-Cola, Cars.com and HomeAway had done the same.

Whether this is a smart tactic for everyone remains to be seen, but in a world saturated with advertising, $3 million seems like a relatively small price to pay to get people to talk about your ad.