Super Bowl XLV Sunday if finally here: The big day when two teams get to play some football in front of the biggest television audience of the year and the brands get to show us what 60 second message they think is worth close to $3 million.
I took a look back this morning through some of my Super Bowl posts from previous years looking to find some interesting stats. Here's a post that I wrote two years ago on February 4, 2009, a couple of days after the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII down in Tampa Bay. The Steelers became the first team to win six Super Bowl titles that year. So can they make it a seventh today? And what happened to the Arizona Cardinals? They didn't even make the playoffs this year, in fact they were last in the NFC West, the worst division in the NFL this year. What a difference two years makes!
95% of Super Bowl Ads Scored Online was the title of my 2009 post which referenced a search marketing scorecard created by Reprise Media that measured advertisers who integrated their TV ads with search and social media. It showed that 69%, 2/3 of advertisers, bought paid search keywords on their brand and products. For example, E-Trade bought the keywords "Talking Babies". I just Googled it now and no ads for e-Trade came up, although my results organically gave me a video link for one of the E-Trade Talking Babies ads. Maybe now they don't need to buy the words.
The other interesting stat from this scorecard was that only 22%, 1 in 5 Super Bowl ads, included a specific call to action directing viewers to their website. This was the same year that Wendy's promoted the free breakfast in their ad and it's a good thing they didn't reference their website because it went down shortly after the ad ran from the amount of traffic that it received. Wendy's isn't back in this year's Super Bowl broadcast.
I ended that post with the question, will we get to 100% integration in the future between the ads and online? This year we've jumped right past website integration and went straight to social media making this the Digital Social Super Bowl. All my posts this year have been about how the brands are integrating social media into their ad campaigns and trying to make the most out of their $3 million investment. Why we even have the non-advertisers doing it with campaigns that tie into the "Big Game".
One of the advertisers, Audi, who I've written about already this year "Luxury auto makers utilizing Super Bowl XLV to take the plunge into social media", will be the first brand in history to include a Twitter Hashtag in it's ad. Two years ago when I wrote the post on Super Bowl XLIII a very, very small percentage of the nation even knew what at Twitter hashtag was! Now we have people all over the world following #Egypt.
The hashtag "#ProgressIs" is expected to be shown in Audi's ad which is scheduled to run during the first break after kick-off. Viewers who use the hashtag and the URL "audi.us/ProgressIs" in their tweets will be entered to win a trip to Sonoma, California, to test drive an Audi R8 supercar. Audi will also award $25,000 to a charity on behalf of the grand prize winner. The Super Bowl ad, promoting A8, is set to feature two well-dressed inmates trying to escape from a luxury prison, along with a cameo by Kenny G.
So enjoy the day and the game. I'm going to be watching it on our HDTV from my living room couch with my computer on my lap, while following the tweets on Visa's new Go Inside the Super Bowl page, @VisaNFL, and reading what my friends on and reading what my friends on Facebook have to say. All the while cheering for the Packers. Stay-tuned for some post game day coverage.

First off most people don't use the proper keywords in their title tag. This is what shows up at the very top of your browser when you visit a site as well as on the search engine results page. If you look at the top of your browser now you'll see the words "Donna's Promo Talk - Promotional Marketing that Creates Excitement and Gets Results " Before the conference it just read "Donna's Promo Talk". I just changed this to add my tag line to the name of the blog so I hopefully will now start to see more traffic from people searching for "Promotional Marketing".









