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Posts Tagged ‘ads’

The Gamification of the Super Bowl

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.

By Mark Evans - February 7th, 2011 - 1 Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Posted in Social Media

What Super Bowl Ads Had the Most Buzz?

For many people, the Super Bowl isn’t about the game – although yesterday’s match-up between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts was thrilling – but the dozens of commercials that appear throughout the four-hour event. For advertisers, there is a lot on the line with some 30-second spots costing as much as $3-million.

With so much interest, we were curious about whether the ads seen as the best attracted the most buzz within the social media landscape. So, we used our MAP to get a lay of the land.

Within our BuzzGraph, the most discussed keyword is “commercial”. The strongest links are XLIV (aka Super Bowl 44), “Dockers”, which ran an ad entitled “Men Without Pants” that featured a group of men walking through a field without pants; “Dorito’s”, which ran four different ads, and “Parisian”, an ad from Google (the first time it has done a Super Bowl ad) that featured search results of someone traveling to Paris and meeting a Parisian.

What’s interesting is the ads by Dorito’s, Dockers or Google were not seen as among the best, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Times’ top-five ads were from Snickers, Bridgestone, Coca-Cola, Budweiser and CBS.

As well, there was little chatter about a controversial pro-life ad featuring University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, which garnered a lot of attention leading up to the game.

Some people suggest the Snickers ad (below), which appeared just before the Tebow ad, may have defused the situation. The Snickers ad featured 88-year-old actress Betty White being tackled during a pick-up football game.

The best ad, according to the LA Times, was from Coca-Cola, in which Homer Simpson’s boss, Mr. Burns, loses all his money, but the people of Springfield cheer him up with a Coke and a smile.

In terms of the total social media conversations about the Super Bowl, there have been 1.6 million tweets, 40,338 blog posts and 11,548 articles since yesterday.

For the past week, there have been 2.3 million tweets, 96,684 blog posts and 37,467 articles.

By Mark Evans - February 8th, 2010 - 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Events, Technology

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