Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Advertising

For Super Bowl XLIV Advertisers, Synergy Is the Name of the Game

FOR millions of football fans, the Super Bowl is the biggest social occasion of the year. That is becoming the case for Super Bowl advertisers, too, as they add a robust presence in social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to their marketing lineups.

Years ago, the purchase of a commercial during the game was accompanied by not much more than promotions and a publicity campaign. That changed with the rise of the Internet as an ad medium as sponsors started supplementing Super Bowl buys in ways that included special Web sites, video clips and search-engine marketing.

Now, “we’re probably in the 3.0 phase of how to think about the Super Bowl,” said Jim Lecinski, a managing director in the Chicago office of Google, which owns YouTube, as advertisers capitalize on the growth of social media to promote the spots they intend to run in the game and give them a life beyond Super Bowl Sunday.

•

YouTube plans for a third year to offer its Super Bowl Ad Blitz channel, where consumers can watch all the commercials after the game. For Super Bowl XLIV on Feb. 7, a contest to select viewers’ favorite spots will receive more prominence on the YouTube home page, Mr. Lecinski said, and “there will be a user gadget to embed the videos across an array of social sites like Facebook.”

In a survey by Venables Bell & Partners in San Francisco, which is creating a commercial for Audi to appear during Super Bowl XLIV, 41 percent of respondents said they would re-watch the spots online on Web sites like AOL, Yahoo and YouTube.

And 26 percent of respondents said they planned to pass on their favorite commercials to friends and family through e-mail messages or social media sites.

“That’s the way you have to go to market now,” said Kathy O’Brien, vice president for personal care at the Unilever United States office in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. “The Super Bowl is an element of a complete, 360-degree campaign.”

Unilever United States is buying a 45-second spot in the game — created by the Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide unit of WPP — for a new line of products named Dove Men+Care. The commercial is to be complemented by blog posts, Ms. O’Brien said, as well as presences on Facebook and Twitter.

“During the Super Bowl, we’re going to use Twitter to engage the audience in real time by reaching out to people Tweeting,” she added, “and urging them to watch our commercial again.”

Similarly, the E*Trade Financial Group will turn to venues like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to promote a 30-second commercial the company intends to run in the game.

Image
E*Trade's promotion delivers e-mail messages heard in a baby's voice.

The spot, featuring a new infant to portray the E*Trade talking baby character, is created by Grey New York, part of the Grey Group division of WPP.

“There are new-media leverage opportunities to take advantage of,” said Nick Utton, chief marketing officer at the New York office of E*Trade, that will extend beyond what the company did for Super Bowl XLIII.

Although last year’s efforts produced “very favorable results,” Mr. Utton said, “we’ve ramped up our act dramatically” by taking steps that include an initiative called BabyMail, produced by a New York agency named Oddcast. It will begin on Feb. 5 and enable visitors to a Web site to send e-mail messages using voices that simulate baby talk.

“In the old days, the only way to see the ads was to watch on television,” Mr. Utton said. “Now, all the pieces work synergistically.”

The Volkswagen of America unit of the German automaker Volkswagen plans a campaign with social media and digital elements to begin after its commercial appears during the Super Bowl. The 30-second spot will be the first from the brand’s new agency, the Los Angeles office of Deutsch, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies.

“A couple of years ago,” said Mike Murphy, vice president for global sales at Facebook, a presence in social media was “more about experimentation: ‘I want to check the box on Facebook.’ ”

“Now, it’s more about strategy,” he added, as “we’re becoming more mainstream and core.”

•

Among the brands advertising during Super Bowl XLIV that have Facebook fan pages are Audi, Bud Light, Coca-Cola, Denny’s, Dodge, Doritos and Hyundai. Doritos, sold by the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo, is promoting on its fan page a contest to help select three commercials created by consumers that will appear during Super Bowl XLIV.

The increasing role social media is playing for Super Bowl sponsors is echoed by efforts to include mobile marketing in the media mix.

For example, two clients of Usablenet, a mobile company in New York, are buying spots on Feb. 7. They are Dockers, sold by Levi Strauss & Company, and Kia, part of Hyundai Motor of South Korea.

“If you’re spending lots of money bringing people to an online experience, the mobile experience should be comparable” on devices like Android phones, BlackBerrys and iPhones, said Jason Taylor, a vice president at Usablenet.

That is particularly true for the Super Bowl, he added, because many people watching the game “are not at home and don’t have their computers with them, so a natural place for them to turn to is their mobile phones.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: For Super Bowl XLIV Advertisers, Synergy Is the Name of the Game. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT