During Sunday’s big game, the commercials were (as usual) a big focus of the night. Thankfully, the game itself wasn’t overshadowed by the commercials or by old dudes playing during halftime. Nonetheless, there were a few memorable moments from the night away from the gridiron. There was the controversial showing of the Tim Tebow commercial, which had been talked about ad nauseum in the media. There was the highly-anticipated Google commercial, although as soon as I saw the opening 2 seconds, I knew that I had already seen the same clip on one of Google’s YouTube channels several months back. For me personally, there wasn’t anything too noteworthy about the Super Bowl commercials this year, to be honest.
In fact, the most noteworthy thing was that CBS seemed to have been unable to sell all of its commercial slots. Especially towards the end of the game, I noticed that every other commercial was for CBS’ own shows, like NCIS and CSI and whatever other acronymed series the network has. My hypothesis about a possible cause? Social media. Seems like even the big corporations with the cash on hand to buy multimillion-dollar 30-second spots have begun to realize that social media marketing may have a greater impact on market share and “mind share” than even commercials during the most-watched television broadcast ever.
Case in point: While Coca-Cola still bought their standard slots for the Super Bowl, Pepsi decided to skip its Super Bowl commercials for the first time in 23 years, and instead invest the money in social media-related marketing. Comments from Larry Woodward, president and CEO of ad agency Vigilante, were likely similar to Pepsi’s reasoning:
“As television viewership has gone down, Internet usage, particularly social media interaction, has increased… in the important 18-34 demographic, a whopping 85 percent use social media (texting, blogging or social networking), and the phenomenal growth of social media has the attention of every major company.”
If CBS cannot even fill up advertising slots for an event has always drawn more than 80 million viewers for ~20 years, then a shift in corporate thinking about marketing really has begun!
Source: Picture from the San Francisco Chronicle.
