Donna's Promo Talk - Promotional Marketing that Creates Excitement and Gets Results

Super Bowl XLVI Wrap Up....And the Winners Are:

Super Bowl XLVI created some big winners and also some losers. Obviously as we all know now, the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots in what was a come-from-behind, great game. The Giants got to parade down Broadway in New York City yesterday to celebrate with their fans. Yes, the fans and New York are all winners here as well. Plus of course we have Eli Manning, the MVP of the game, who now has two Super Bowl rings, one more than his brother Payton as the media was sure to bring up several times.

In the 6th annual Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest the two ads that were chosen from the 5 finalists to broadcast during the game were both winners. However, the Sling Baby ad has now been picked as the winner in the USA TODAY/Facebook Super Bowl Ad Meter. Online voting, began after each ad aired during Sunday night's broadcast and ended at 6 pm on Tuesday. Viewers picked from 55 commercials on which advertisers spent up to a record $3.5 million for each 30-second slot. Kevin Willson submitted the ad of the grandmother and baby who snatched a bag of Doritos and he will now receive a million dollars and a consulting contract with The Lonely Island. The other Doritos ad that was broadcast during the game, Man's Best Friend, came in #6.

All of us who signed up to be Papa John's Reward members and voted in their Super Bowl Coin Toss Experience came out winners as well. I voted for heads and heads was the choice that the majority voted for and heads ended up as the actual winner of the coin toss. Yesterday I received my prize code online which is good for a free, large, one-topping pizza and a two-liter Pepsi MAX. Papa Johns sent an email to all members which I had to retrieve from my spam folder. The email invited me to a landing page which I had to type in my name and email to receive my personal code. I have up till March 4 to redeem my prize. Papa John's now had to award many free pizzas, which hopefully for them will turn all us winners into regular customers. It will be interesting to find out the final results as to how many free pizzas were actually redeemed.

Twitter also came out a winner in the social media category averaging more than 10,000 tweets per second and not crashing! According to Twitter, the most tweeted moment of the game was when 12,233 people tweeted in a single second at the end when Tom Brady's Hail Mary pass wasn't caught. The second most tweeted moment came during Madonna's halftime show, which averaged more than 8,000 tweets per second and had a high of 10,245 tweets in a single second.

Personally I was watching the game with my laptop both tweeting and posting updates on Facebook. It was fun to see what others were saying and commenting on. I was trying to stay up to following a few hashtags on Twitter about the ads. My update on Facebook that received the most Likes and comments during the game was this: "David Beckham is pretty good to look at too. Don't ya think?". Now you get a sense of what my women friends like (as well as a male gay friend who Liked it as well).

Towards the end of the game I wasn't socializing any more. I just grabbed another drink and started praying the Giants would come out on top. Which they did in all nail-biting action. Thanks NFL. Now it will be quite some time before we see anymore football. Bring on the Summer Olympic Games!

BTW - I also finally came out a winner in our squares. The safety in the first quarter helped me win that square with a final score of 9-0!

Other than the Giants or Patriots, who else will come out a winner from Super Bowl XLVI?

I will be one of the millions watching Super Bowl XLV1 this Sunday and hoping for a good game, which it should be. As I've stated in my posts over the past couple of weeks, I'm behind the New York Giants all the way and would love to see Eli Manning get another super bowl win, especially while in his brother Peyton's home stadium. I'm sure Peyton will be there also, just not on the field this year.

I'm also hoping to see some real social media integration with the advertising campaigns that we see. If the advertisers are paying an average of $3.5 million for a spot, you would think they would try and get the most bang for their bucks. Last year I called it the "Social Super Bowl" and was disappointed with the overall advertising experience. Other than posting ads on social media, the brands did very little to really engage people and integrate social media into their strategies.

Other than the Giants beating the Patriots, who else is going to come out a winner? Last year the Volkswagen Darth Vader ad scored the highest in the USA Ad Meter for best liked ad. (What was not to like?) Volkswagen utilized social media to post the ad on their blog, on YouTube and their Facebook page five days before the game and it had 13 million views before kickoff. Sine then the ad as gotten numerous awards and nearly 50 million views on YouTube.

This year Volkswagen has already launched The Bark Side, a teaser video featuring a chorus of dogs barking The Imperial March. If you haven't seen it yet, here it is. I love it and think it's brilliant (especially since I'm a sucker for doggies!). It currently has over 10 million views on YouTube. If you click through to YouTube you will also be given the opportunity to view their new game time ad called "The Dog Strikes Back".

Papa John's, the Official Pizza of the NFL, decided not to run an ad during the game last year, but instead launched a huge promotion. They offered a free, large, three-topping pizza to all of its online rewards program members if the game went into overtime as well as a $45 Papa John’s gift card every 45 seconds to randomly selected consumers who ordered its pizzas online during game day.

This resulted in Papa John’s selling over a million pizza's during game day which beat it's previous Super Bowl Sunday sales record of 940,000 pizzas in 2010. Of course they didn't give out the free pizzas since the game last year didn't go into overtime. BTW, the Super Bowl has never gone into overtime, so the odds where in their favor. Papa John's did increase their loyalty membership numbers significantly though from this.

Now this year's promotion has a little better odds for their rewards members. They're offering a free, large, one-topping pizza and a two-liter Pepsi MAX to each member depending on the game’s coin toss. To be eligible people have to be a rewards program and call either heads or tails on the toss at papajohns.com. Tomorrow, Feb. 2, Papa John's will announce on their website what America's choice was and then if that choice is correct on game day all members will win. I just voted and went with heads. So we'll see.

Papa John’s is also running another sweepstakes but instead of giving away gift cards, their giving away pizzas. This year they have been randomly selecting winners from among online pizza-orders every 46 seconds each weekend starting back on Friday, Dec. 30, and ending on this Saturday, Feb. 4, the evening before game day. To follow the "No Purchase Necessary" requirement, rewards members also can enter without ordering a pizza, by following instructions in the Official Rules.

This year Papa John's has also created a promotional 30-second spot TV spot that stars Super Bowl champions Peyton Manning and Jerome “The Bus” Bettis kibitzing in a football stadium with Papa John's founder/chairman/CEO “Papa” John Schnatter talking about the coin-toss promotion. The commercial first aired during Jan. 22’s NFC and AFC Championship games, and has been airing since then.

They have integrated social media into the campaign by including a dedicated Twitter hashtag (#freepapajohns). Also when participants vote online for the coin-toss they have the option to sign into Facebook to “personalize” their experience. I did and I got to see my Facebook profile photo with my name up on the scoreboard in the stadium integrated into the online video. It happened so quickly though I almost missed it. So not the best social media integration I would say.

So now I two have a chance of being a winner after this Sunday's Big Game. Either I could win a free pizza from Papa John's along with an actual Chevy and other prizes from Chevy's Gametime app. (Plus some cash if my squares come out lucky!) It's great to see promotions playing a big role in these marketing strategies. Plus. I'm sure Volkswagen and Doritos won't be the only ads with animals in them. Hope you enjoy the game. I'll be writing a post game review next week. So please check back.

Super Bowl Mobile App from Chevy comes with a big Game Time Sweepstakes

Last Sunday was by far one of the most exciting NFL conference championship game days any real football fan can ask for. Yes, it will take a while for Raven fans to get over the missed chip-shot field goal and the 49er's to wonder what if they didn't turn over the ball in overtime. We're now moving on to Super Bowl XLVI with a big rematch between the Patriots and the Giants. As I said in my last post, I'm betting on Eli Manning and the New York Giants to be this year's champions.

The Super Bowl has now become the most active topic of the millions of us who write blogs posts and updates on Facebook, Twitter and now, Google+. In 2011, the only Facebook status update topic in the world, amongst 800 million users at the time that beat out the Packers winning Super Bowl 45 was the death of Osama bin Laden. Since many of these tweets and Facebook updates come via a mobile phone, this year General Motors and Chevrolet is adding mobile to their mix to capitalize off this.

If you want to watch the Super Bowl on February 5th on your smartphone or tablet, Chevy's got an app for that. The Chevy Game Time app is now available in the Android Market, Apple's App Store and at chevy.com/gametime. The app will ask viewers trivia and poll questions on subjects including the game, teams and commercials. Participants who answer trivia correctly or choose the most-common poll answer will be entered into the Chevrolet Game Time Sweepstakes drawing. The sweepstakes is awarding thousands of prizes including some instant Win Prizes from Bridgestone, Motorola, the NFL and NFLShop.com, Papa John's Pizza and Sirius XM Radio.

Chevrolet will be running several ads during NBC's Super Bowl broadcast. When someone downloads the app, they receive a unique "license plate" number and if anyone's numbers match any plate in Chevy's Super Bowl spots, they will win one of 20 Chevy's. There is also an alternate means of entry in which someone that does not want to download the app can register for the sweepstakes by visiting chevy.com/gametime.

So I just downloaded the app and will try it out. I don't have a tablet yet, so I will be experiencing it off my Droid Incredible phone. Should be interesting. In the meantime we all now have to go a whole weekend with no football! Let the fun begin.

Marketing During the Super Bowl is a No-Brainer for Many Brands

By Guest Blogger, Dave Thomas, Online Content Editor for business.com

While it’s no surprise that advertisements during the Super Bowl cost big dollars, that hasn’t stopped many companies from opening up their checkbooks to market their wares.

Recent reports note that NBC, this year’s host for the Feb. 5 event in Indianapolis, sold its entire allotment of commercial airtime for the game before Thanksgiving 2011, having a waiting list to boot.

According to the network, slots are still open during NBC's pregame show, and those on the waiting list for the Super Bowl will have an opportunity to advertise if other companies forfeit their slots.

So, how much does an ad cost when more than 100 million people tune in to watch the AFC and NFC battle next month?

The average cost for a 30-second spot in 2012 is $3.5 million, with some time slots leading advertisers to spend as much as $4 million. The bottom line is you better have a sizeable amount of cash to spend if you want to get noticed on Super Bowl Sunday during the year’s most watched sporting event.

When you break down the marketing efforts of advertisers and NBC for that matter, at a $3.5 million average, the 70 commercials that appear during the game would lead to $245 million in gross revenue. When you take away the ad agency commission, NBC would take in just over $208 million when all is said and done.

There are also six commercials scheduled for halftime, along with a plethora of them slated to run in the nauseating six hours of pregame hype.

As a spokesperson for the sales and marketing team with the NBC Sports Group noted, “We should shatter all prior records for that day.”

As many marketing and sales pros can attest to, it isn’t just the televisions sets where people will be exposed to advertisements. The network is also selling spots on its live streamed broadcast of the game and on Super Bowl-related programming to be broadcast on the NBC Sports Network.

Among the companies planning to market their products during the game next month are Volkswagen, General Motors, Toyota, Dannon, Century 21, GoDaddy.com, and Bridgestone.

While most small businesses will never get the chance to market their products during an event such as the Super Bowl, there are lessons to be learned from the experience. Among them are:

• Always be sure to reinforce your brand and/or business. While some Super Bowl messages are cute and funny, the brand sometimes gets lost in the message. Marketers want consumers to remember who they are whether it is a 30-second spot or a 60-second one. Make sure you don’t leave people guessing as to what your message is;
• Logos, web addresses, phone numbers, etc. are essential. It is important when marketing to make sure consumers have the ability to reach out to you. You can have the best product in the world, but without a way for people to reach you, what good is it? Don’t make consumers have to work to find you;
• Redefine the targeted audience – This is why surveys, reports, metrics etc. are important. Make sure you are marketing to the right demographics so that your money is well spent. If your primary market is young women, don’t spend your time marketing to middle age men in hopes that they will pass the details along to their younger offspring.

You may not be advertising during the biggest television spectacle of the year, but that doesn’t mean your marketing efforts are worthless.

Score a touchdown with the right marketing campaigns, which begin with kicking off in the right direction.

Dave Thomas, who covers among other items starting a small business and business proposals, writes extensively for Business.com, an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

Supporting Pink in Honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month

October is here and we're starting to see a good amount of Pink in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month. Many big brands and organizations have become supporters in one way or another to help create awareness and raise funds for breast cancer research. So each October I usually will do a couple of blog posts on who's doing what to support the cause.

Some first signs of Pink I noticed this past Sunday while watching NFL football. That's because throughout October the league is allowing players, coaches and referees to wear pink gear and feature special game balls and pink coins in support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The NFL's campaign "A Crucial Catch", is in partnership with the American Cancer Society, and is focused on the importance of annual screenings. Some players are supporting the cause by wearing pink cleats, gloves, sweatbands and towels. All apparel worn at games will be auctioned off at NFL Auction with proceeds benefiting the American Cancer Society and team charities. You can purchase some of this pink gear and apparel at the NFL Shop.

The idea for the shoes came from Carolina Panthers running back DeAngelo Williams whose mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004. She is now in remission, however his three sisters died from the disease. "Her detecting it early was the reason she was able to pull through it,” Williams said in this NY Times article.

Another interesting campaign this year, "The Pledge To Fight Forward", is being sponsored by pharmaceutical marketer Celgene, in an effort to focus attention on women suffering from metastatic breast cancer. Metastatic cancer is a cancer that has spread from the part of the body where it started (the primary site) to other parts of the body. The campaign is built around a digital component, this website, which enables supporters to pledge by sending an electronic postcard to show support and spread awareness of metastatic breast cancer. Supporters are also encouraged to send them the old-fashioned way via actual postcards distributed in hospitals, doctors' offices and treatment centers.

I just sent one of these postcards to my sister since this is personally very close to us. We lost our mom last year to metastatic breast cancer. Here was a situation in which the breast cancer was detected early and the doctors thought they had cured her. Only to find out a year later that it was back in her lungs. My sister was the primary family member that supported my mom through this illness and accompanied her on most of her visits to the doctor and the treatment center. We didn't initially understand all that you eventually learn once you do have a loved one with cancer. Support groups such as this are indeed a source of information and hope.

Many of us have personal stories that we can share regarding this terrible illness. With all the research and communications encouraging early screening we hopefully will start to see a decrease in the amount of women this affects. Just this past summer two women on our golf league each had double mastectomy surgery. Both are doing well and appear to be fine. One of the women was our league leader who, with all she was going through, hardly missed a week of golf and still kept the group organized.

This past weekend at our annual end of the year golf tournament and dinner we thanked our leader by donating to a local organization, The Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester. I helped organize the event and was so pleased at the tremendously positive response that it generated which resulted in a $550 donation.

It's amazing what can be done when people get behind a cause they feel passionate about. This is definitely one of them.

NFL Football is Back Along with New Ad and Marketing Campaigns targeting us Fans!

If you have been following my blog over the years you know that I'm a huge football fan and love to write about it. This week we kicked off a new NFL season and while I will miss the summer, I'm so glad football is back. To top it off, my team, THE BUFFALO BILLS, won on the road! Not only did they come home with a "W", but they dominated the Kansas City Chiefs, 41-7. Those that follow the NFL know that the Bills have had a really bad streak over the past decade. Not since the days of Jim Kelly when we made the Super Bowl four years in a row have we had anything to celebrate. Maybe, just maybe this will be the year!

Okay, now that I got my gushing out of the way, what I really want to write about is the huge marketing arm of the NFL. Many big brands and media companies were shaking in their booties over the fact that the NFL season might not have happened this year. However, the owners and players finally got together and agreed to some terms and the training camps began.

What I think the NFL and some of the brands are really starting to get is that there are many of us women who are huge football fans. It's not just the guys, who yes can be carried away by any sport. But women really love football. Maybe because it started with our high school teams on Friday nights and then college weekend games. Or maybe because there are so many good looking quarterbacks. I don't know. But I'm hooked on the game.

What disappoints me though ever time I sit down to watch a game is the barrage of TV commercials, mostly by the beer brands, that think by targeting Neanderthals they are creating a good brand image. Yes, some young men always have just a couple of things on their minds, but I do get really tired, real quickly of seeing these ads and so do many men that I know. There were a few of these ads that premiered during week 1. However, I did notice a slight change for the better in some others. More auto brands were advertising during the game and include couples in their ads that speak to both men and women. The NFL was promoting itself quite a bit as well during week 1. I especially like the NFLshop.com ad with a guy giving all his friends NFL team merchandise and handing over a pair of boots, like these Buffalo Bills ones, to a girlfriend.

Being in the promotional marketing business with a specialty on sweepstakes and contests, I am aware of the many brands who pay big bucks to have a sponsorship with the NFL as well as the individual teams. I worked with Kodak for several years when they were the Official Film of the NFL, back in the days when there was such a thing as film. We developed many promotions around the NFL teams and the Super Bowl, including those that offered chances to win game tickets.

Every year around this time we receive several inquires from companies that would like to run a sweepstakes and give away tickets to the Super Bowl, this year it's in Indianapolis. I tell them, yes you can purchase trip packages from travel websites that include tickets, but you can't use the term "Super Bowl" in any of your communications unless you are a sponsor. That's why you see many campaigns that allude to football and the "Big Game", but don't use the words or logos of the NFL or the teams. I am still surprised by how many marketing people don't understand this and question us.

Here's a clever little "football" promotion we are currently working on for a client that I thought I'd share. It ties into the new season, doesn't use any team or NFL affiliation and does a great job of relating football to its brand. American Signature Furniture (also known as Value City Furniture depending on where in the country you are) launched this SoFANtastic Sweepstakes on their Facebook pages this past Saturday. They are giving away three $700 gift cards, one winner for each week of football in September. Participants can enter once every week, but first they must vote on which sofa out of three featured that best shows off their style for hosting a football party in their living room. We're working with digital agency Rockfish Interactive on this one who came up with the concept.

So sit back and enjoy the fall and football. Let's not forget though that we still have the boys of October to talk about. Go Red Sox! Yes, women like baseball too!

March Madness and Social Media - a Perfect Match

It's March 20th and we're right into the middle of March Madness. This is one of those annual events that I just have to write about since it's become such a nationwide phenomenon for the short time it exists. Most will say March Madness is about basketball, brackets and bets, but those marketers that have been involved it it for the last few years know it's now all social media.

Right now as I'm writing this post I've also been watching the Syracuse vs. Marquette game which is round three for both these teams attempting to proceed to the Sweet 16. Unfortunately for us Western New York fans, Syracuse just lost 66 to 62.

Social media this year is playing a major role in the NCAA's annual basketball championships and marketers have come up with creative ways to keep consumers engaged. Millions of viewers have been and will continue watching the three-week tournament’s games online. A 11.7 million hours of live streaming games occurred in 2010, so that means that social media is must have marketing strategy for the big brands such as Coca-Cola, Unilever and AT&T.

"They’re all following the eyeballs,” says social-media consultant Rebecca Lieb. “And consumers are leading the charge.” Coke is a major sponsor and has increased  its social-media spending around the tournament. They will spend more than 20% of its tournament budget on social media this year compared with 2% last year.

Coke has devised a social-media gathering place dubbed the Coke Zero Social Arena, where fans can go for professional commentary and fan chatter. Coke will aggregate tweets about the game by team and try to refine social chatter in one place. “This is where our consumers are,” says William White, group director for Coke Zero.

Hershey’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups brand is inviting fans to visit its Facebook page with a promotion offering fans a chance of shooting a half-court basket for $1 million at next year’s tournament. The brand has more than 6.6 million Facebook fans, says spokeswoman Anna Lingeris.

Unilever’s Dove brand is posting tales from tournament legends such as former Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson and Georgetown University coach John Thompson III on Facebook. Unilever hopes fans will share. “We want to reach guys where they live, work and play,” says Rob Candelino, marketing director.

AT&T has created an NCAA Facebook friend app sweepstakes asking folks to pick which Facebook friend they would choose to take with them to this year’s NCAA Final Four. “We have to be where people are spending their time,” says Vance Overbey, executive director of advertising.

Good luck to all the teams that are moving on to the Sweet Sixteen. And to the Syracuse Orangemen, congrats on a great season.

Did Super Bowl XLV live up to be the Social Super Bowl?

The Vince Lombardi trophy is now back home with the Packers in Green Bay (Yeah!) and Super Bowl XLV is a thing of the past. I've been reading many of the reviews that report on what ads people recall the most, which ones they like, which ones they don't like. etc. and honestly, I have to admit I feel a huge let down from the overall experience.

Maybe it's just me because I've been writing the past several weeks about the different marketing and advertising campaigns from the big brands and how this was going to be the "Digital Social Super Bowl". I reviewed many of the TV commercials online before the actual broadcast of the game including all the Dorito's and Pepsi Max ads as well as most from the auto makers, especially Chevrolet which I got to watch all four together. There is something to say about watching these ads all at once with a person's full attention which is great for a brand. But then when you see them during the game it's kinda ho-hum.

  Here's a couple of interesting facts:

The Volkswagen Darth Vader ad scored the highest in the USA Ad Meter for best liked ad. (What was not to like? It's cute.) Volkswagen utilized social media to post the ad on their blog, on YouTube and their Facebook page five days before the game and it had 13 million views by kickoff.

This was the fifth year Dorito's hosted the Crash the Super Bowl contest and added Pepsi Max which combined, they aired six consumer-made spots during the game. The Doritos' spots have finished in Ad Meter's top five every year and twice they finished first. This year each brand placed two spots in Ad Meter's top 10. That included one Doritos spot, The Pug's Revenge, that tied for first place. On Sunday night, Doritos and Pepsi had 3 million-plus video views between them.

I have to admit, I'm a sucker for any spot that has a dog in it, especially a pug, but the guy in that Dorito's ad was really annoying. Most of the other consumer-generated ads that won were the same ole, same ole...people getting hit in the groin, the head, etc. The contest I feel is getting a little old, so I was glad to read in this USA Today article a comment by Rudy Wilson, marketing vice president at Frito-Lay, "The brands are "rethinking" the Crash the Super Bowl promo for the 2012 game in a way that will involve more social media." I certainly hope so, because I'd like to see it continue.

Other than posting ads on social media, the brands did very little to really engage people and integrate social media into their strategies. Yes, the Audi spot included a Twitter Hashtag at the end. However, if I hadn't written about it I would have probably missed it since it flashed so quickly and in small type on the screen at the end of the ad.

The interesting thing about Twitter though is that is was the leading media source for Super Bowl conversations. More than two-thirds of Super Bowl ad conversations (67.75%) were conducted via Twitter which equated to roughly 173,602 social mentions. Social networks (e.g., Facebook) only got 8.59% and blogs 4.61% of the conversation. Here's the graph created from Alterian's Social Engagement Index.

As far as the brands go:

• Volkswagen had the highest number of social conversations (10,342) and highest percentage of positive "Sentiment" (22.03%) and the lowest percentage of negative Sentiment (3.04%).
• Doritos ranked second, both in levels of mentions (9,898) and positive Sentiment (19.76%).
• Pepsi was third with 8,282 mentions, of which 17.68% were positive.
• Groupon, which ran an ad referencing the struggles of the Tibetan people, garnered the most negative Sentiment (12.96%) among the top 5 brands.
• Motorola rounded out the top 5 with 6,485 social mentions, of which 10.60% were positive.

Lastly I would like to quote Ian Schafer who wrote this post on Advertising Age regarding the lack of real social media integration in this year's "Social Super Bowl".

But none of them (the advertisers) will reap the benefit of actually building a meaningful connection.

Chrysler could have given the audience a social, charitable platform to help Detroit, a city in need.

Motorola could have identified individual early (?) adopters willing to "be different".

Coca-Cola could have actually helped some real people make some real people happy.

But alas, we were left with skits. And some commercials. Some commercials were skits. Some connected, but none of them built connections.

And that's a shame. Because at time like this, marketing needs to be about people. Not just crotch-kicks.

I agree totally with Ian and like his thinking. As I've said many times, social media is about the people, it's a conversation. And yes, while there were many conversations on Twitter recorded, were the brands listening? We'll see what they come up with next for Super Bowl XLVI. Tell us what you think. Do you agree with Ian and me or do you think they did a good job connecting with us? Thanks everyone for listening to me.

Super Bowl XLV Sunday is here: Get your TV's, Tweets and Treats ready

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.

"Go Inside" Super Bowl XLV with new Twitter page sponsored by Visa

Only four days away from Super Bowl XLV kicking off at Cowboy Stadium in Arlington, Texas. You would think that Texas would be immune to winter weather, but not this year. The storm that has blanketed half the country even hit Dallas yesterday and thousands of flights have been canceled. Nonetheless, the game will go on and I'm sure many die-hard Packers and Steelers fans will make their way to Arlington one way or another.

I've predicted in the first post I wrote about this year's big game that Super Bowl XLV will be the "Digital Social Super Bowl" and every post I've written since then has backed that up. One of the more recent social media news released this past week has been the partnership between the NFL, Visa and Twitter to launch the first official online Super Bowl XLV destination featuring Twitter content.

 "Go Inside Super Bowl XLV with Visa" @VISANFL promises to provide fans with a single location to experience the most relevant Super Bowl XLV chatter happening on Twitter, including coverage of the event from all angles. It will include Tweets from some of the best people covering Super Bowl XLV and will pull in Tweets about the game, the NFL (@nfl), the Green Bay Packers (@packers) and Pittsburgh Steelers (@steelers). It also states it will feature Tweets from NFL executives, media personalities, NFL players, Visa and celebrities contributing to telling the story of Super Bowl XLV on Twitter.

The site also will provide fans an easy way to send Tweets to players or include mentions of them in their Tweets by clicking on player photos. Fans also may contribute to the conversation by tagging their Tweets with #SB45, which is the official hashtag of Super Bowl XLV.

A microlink to this Twitter site will be featured on the NFL's official Super Bowl XLV site. Fans may access it via the web or mobile web. Visa (@VisaNFL) will run a supporting campaign on Twitter with "Promoted Tweets" and "Promoted Trends." I'm surprised they haven't brought back the idea of streaming tweets during a TV broadcast. Let's hope they don't.

Visa is an ongoing sponsor of the NFL and earlier this season they hosted the 24/7 Fan Sweepstakes via Visa's Fans for Life Facebook page, offering fans another way to win tickets to Super Bowl XLV, and used the page to introduce fans to the Never Miss a Super Bowl Club, featured in its advertising campaign.

I will most likely report back next week on the post-game "Social Super Bowl" results. So stay tuned and let us know what ad and campaign you liked and what you didn't. In the meantime, stay warm, dry and don't get stuck in the snow!