Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 2, 2009 | Share This |

Profile Optimization

This year’s Reprise Media Super Bowl Scorecard is out - after all our prep and numbers crunching it’s nice to send our baby out in the world, redfaced and wailing. Oh yeah, and there was some kind of football game that kept interrupting the ads.

One thing I noticed was that for a number of the brands in our top “Touchdown” category, search and social media were used to really extend the lifetime of the ads. Our top ranked brand, E-Trade, had “outtakes” with those mischievous babies acting quite naughty. These were linked up with their paid search campaign well in advance of Super Bowl Sunday. It’s a measure of the quality of these that not once did I think “Where’s John Travolta and Kirstie Alley?” Until now.

The ad on game night drove folks back to their website and to search where even if they typed in realted phrases like “talking babies” they were served up an ad that linked back to an E-Trade landing site (and not thankfully to the Wayan’s Brothers film Little Man.)

The paid search ads linked to the Super Bowl spots have continued, leading users to the ads which are embedded on YouTube, and even to the baby’s Twitter account on the same landing page – ironically one place where they failed to make a full impact. That lazy baby only Tweeted five times before the game though it’s picked up a bit lately. No time for naps in social media!

On the other hand Super Bowl advertiser Sobe (of the 3-d glasses and psychedelic lizards dancing) was (and continues to be) much more active on their Twitter feed, with a great deal of interaction with other Twitter users. Pepsi too got into the Twitter act, with an account dedicted to Pepsuber, their re-configuring of Saturday Night Live‘s MacGyver parody. All of the Tweeting added to the many brands who sent people to dedicated Facebook and YouTube pages adds up to interaction that extends well beyond the 30 second lifetime of the ad.

GoDaddy.com, a perennial favorite in the Scorecard, engaged people online by having a contest to choose which of their ads was the best (they ran them both anyone.) The ads themselves drove people back online during the game with promises of “uncensored content” - which while upping the tastelessness quotient were probably a bit shy of what 12 year-old boys were hoping for.

So why does extending an ad’s lifecycle matter? Well, if you haven’t heard we are in a little something the kids like to call a recession. As Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Peter Hershberg said in our press release today, “The recession forces marketers to put much more scrutiny on every advertising dollar they spend…While some brands clearly got this message, we still see far too many throwing away millions of dollars by failing to connect their TV campaign with an integrated search and social media presence.”

With production costs for TV spots running as high as $6 – $10 million, plus the $3 million cost for Super Bowl airtime, why not wring every single dollar out of those ads?

Want to keep up with the Scorecard? Check out our Scorecard feed on Twitter at @scorecard .

Topics: Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, Media Convergence, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search Marketing Scorecard, Search: News, Social Media, Twitter, YouTube |