It took a little while, but the Internet has fundamentally changed offline advertising. Perhaps no other event highlights those changes as much as the Super Bowl. Companies have for years included their web sites in their TV campaigns, but last year’s Super Bowl saw the emergence of something different. It saw the rise of the mini-site. Instead of just sending traffic to a home page, companies registered and built out specific domain names for an ad campaign. Some might remember Mitsubishi’s innovative See What Happens in Super Bowl 38 and Burger King’s Stars Wars themed viral monster the SithSense.com in Super Bowl 39. This year, rather than only a few commercials sending traffic online, there were more than ten, and in this follow-up Super Bowl piece, we’ll explore them.
Creating ad content that will take on a life of its own is equivalent to creating a profitable online education lead generation landing page and bidding on the phrase “online degrees,” i.e. not an easy thing to do. It’s no wonder that more companies use every means possible to keep whatever momentum they have going, and one of the best is turning to the web. Two types of web-centric campaigns ran this year. Both groups want the traffic, but the first group of companies, truly needs it. These are the web only companies, the group whose business takes place only online. This year featured three. Call them the survivors – no unprofitable businesses or questionable mascots – Careerbuilder.com, Overstock.com, and GoDaddy.com.
Two of the three survivors, Careerbuilder.com and GoDaddy.com advertised in the Super Bowl the previous year, while Overstock has more than made its presence known this past year. Seeing the big O at the big game surprises no one, and their ad, unlike Careerbuilder.com and GoDaddy.com used no hook, just an elaboration of the ongoing theme. Interestingly, though, both Careerbuilder.com and GoDaddy.com didn’t simply rely on their Super Bowl spends. They both created interesting but different pre-Super Bowl marketing campaigns. Careerbuilder.com, for example, bought print and Internet spots in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl not for job seekers but companies posting jobs. Job postings equal revenue. The pre-campaign spoke to their profit center, leveraging the future influx of traffic to drive up sales. It’s quite clever.
Unlike Careerbuilder.com, GoDaddy.com does not have two distinct audiences. Success for the registrar means getting as many people as possible to watch their spot and get in touch with their inner GoDaddy. Domain registration is not a sexy business, except when Candice Michelle is your spokesperson. If you’re GoDaddy.com, it’s not enough to simply make a sexy commercial - that was last year’s approach. You need to do something different but ideally something that connects users to last year’s ad, an ad that centered on being too sexy. GoDaddy’s approach to making the most of their ad spot was to create a real life drama of “the man” rejecting their ads, revision after revision, with the final ad coming down to the wire. Not only does it create suspense; it also creates content for future viewing.
As we saw last year, web only companies aren’t the only ones that try to turn current viewers into future ones. Of the offline brands to have figured it out, Burger King leads the pack. Showing their continued flair for the unexpected, the have it your way company unveiled a musical of burger self-expression and an accompanying website at Whopperettes.com that lets viewers make their own “show.” Pile those acrobatic women your way and enjoy this bizarre but oh so well executed mix of Broadway and burgers.
Dove, Sierra Mist, Scott Tissue, and Pepsi also used the on air time to focus users online. Dove and Sierra Mist featured pre-existing sites – CampaignForRealBeauy.com and Mist-takes.com respectively, while Scott Tissue and Pepsi followed BK’s lead and showcased new ones. For the rear-end crowd, Scott created HalfTimeFlush.com, while Diet Pepsi’s Diddy and can effort resides at BrownandBubbly.com. Interestingly, Scott Tissue did what Diet Pepsi could and should have done – integrate with other technologies. What’s effective today aren’t screensavers, as is the downloadable content offered at BrownandBubbly.com, but digital media. If Scott Tissue’s site offers a truly free ringtone to viewers, and they are promoting toilet paper, you might think that Pepsi might leverage its use of Diddy and other stars by creating a version for the iPod and iPod Video. Bud Light did it with their spots, and more and more companies would be wise to do so in the future. They’ve created some incredible content, free it up and make it available to spread.
Making the commercials available and integrating with digital players isn’t the only trend that should take hold next year. Many of this year’s companies, or at least their agencies, showed an awareness of paid search’s role. Query “super bowl ads,” and you’ll find Nationwide, Careerbuilder, Sprint, Honda, Cadillac’s Escalade, Coca-Cola’s Vault, and Dove, with Nationwide for example doing a great job of directing users who click to the ads. This should be a requirement for all companies. As the guys from Reprise Media mention in their recap, missing from the search space is Ford, who after a wonderful ad didn’t secure any search traffic for people looking for it online. In a sign that online matters, Ford quickly remedied this as a search today would show them at number one.
Exciting as the game itself was and several of the commercials, more exciting was seeing these ads point to online tie-ins and some treated as what they are – content. Marketers this year got a little smarter and a little closer to letting the commercials do what they are supposed to do – work for the companies that created them. My one suggestion to these companies – don’t forget buy up all the different spellings of your domain name. It’s worth the extra few hundred dollars. You can even use GoDaddy.com.
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