It was pretty difficult not to pick up on the game within the game yesterday as the Green Bay Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25 for the Super Bowl.

I’m not talking about mini-battles between the two head coaches or individual players but how the Super Bowl continues to become a much bigger entity than just a football game.

For the past 25 years, one of the biggest “games” has been the television ads created for the Super Bowl and its global audience. Despite the fact ads cost millions of dollars for a 30-second spot, companies have enthusiastically developed these ads to demonstrate their creativity and ability to win over the large audience.

Over the past couple of years, social media has become another “game” as people watching the Super Bowl engage in a new and different way with what’s happening on the field. Call it “social TV” or  the digital couch potato but social media has given fans a new way to get deeper into the game beyond simply watching it with a few friends.

So it’s not surprising to see the worlds of ads and social media collide together during the Super Bowl. Call it the “Gamification of the Super Bowl” but it was interesting to see how watching the ads and talking about them took another step this year.

Fox, which televised the Super Bowl, set up a Web site in which people could vote for their favorite the ads after the game was over. No longer does the media get to decide on the best ads, the people to get vote via social media.

Another example was Dorito’s which rans a strange ad featuring two new flavors. People who saw the ads could vote on the better flavor, as well as decide how the story ended.

It’s not a surprise to see gamification become part of the Super Bowl given it’s having an increasing part of the marketing and business worlds. The Super Bowl has always been more than just a game but it is interesting to see how the game beyond the sidelines continues to evolve.

Speaking of ads, one of the best ones was done by the television show “House”, which did a parody of the infamous Coca-Cola ad featuring Mean Joe Greene.

Tags: ads, gamification, Social Media, super bowl

This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 7:43 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.