Super Bowl Ads: Less Buzz, Still Great?

Once the Seattle Seahawks got knocked out of the playoffs, I tuned out of the Super Bowl hype for a while. Of course, when I saw the results of yesterday’s game between the Packers and Giants, I kind of wish I had watched.

Maybe marketers, like me, are saving all of their energy for the Super Bowl. I had a vague feeling that I wasn’t hearing a lot about the spots that would appear during the big game, and I guess I was right.

According to analysis by Cymfony discussed in a ClickZ news article, this year’s Super Bowl advertisers are doing a lot less pre-game publicity for their advertising. Says Jim Nail of Cymfony: “the volume of traditional online discussion and media coverage is a lot lower than last year.”

According to a briefing Jim gave me in December as part of my work for eMarketer, marketers that hope for post-game discussion in the blogs may be disappointed: 78% of the total volume of Super Bowl ad discussion happened in the three days following the game.

However, and this is important for those of you who pay attention to social media, in last year’s game the traditional media coverage that happened before the game played an integral role in spurring online conversation after the game. In fact, advertisers that released their ad prior to the game ended up with up to five times as much coverage and discussion AFTER the game.

So, what’s holding this year’s crop of marketers back? ClickZ says it may be that UGC, such a buzzword during last year’s game (see: Doritos), is a been-there, done-that. But surely a few marketers have something interesting up their sleeves. So, let’s get this game started!

In the meantime, Cymfony’s Super Bowl Advertisers blog has a running commentary on the latest news.