Five things you can learn from Super Bowl marketing

The American’s Super Bowl is one of the biggest annual sporting events in the world and the 2011 final of the National Football League promises to be a record-breaker – more than 171 million people in America will tune in to watch the game, which is being played this morning (AEST).

But while the Super Bowl is supposedly all about a football match, in the last decade it’s also become one of the year’s biggest marketing events. Around 60 companies will spend up to $3 million to run the now famous 30-second television commercials that run at half time and during breaks in play, while most American businesses will scramble for a slice of the $10 billion that consumers will spend on the game – holding parties, buying snacks, buying team apparel and buying 4.5 million new televisions.

The marketing around the game has become so big that research from US firm Lightspeed Research found 15% of viewers will tune in mainly to watch the ads.

So what can your business learn from one of the biggest marketing events of the year? Plenty – and you don’t even have to like gridiron.

1. Think big

Given it costs up to $3 million to buy airtime for a Super Bowl television commercial – plus the potentially high costs of slick production and a celebrity endorsement – the cost of running an ad during the game would seem to be too high to for a SME or start-up.

However, there is a history of start-ups splurging on ads to build their profile. Several dotcom companies did it during the early 2000s, and this year group-buying pioneer Groupon will launch its first Super Bowl ad, less than two years after the company was established. Executives admit to being nervous about the whole process, but after recently raising $950 million they can afford it.

Here’s a classic Super Bowl ad for a little computer company you may have heard of. At the time, the Apple ad – which is said to have changed the personal computer market forever – spent an unprecedented $US900,000 getting Ridley Scott to direct it.

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2. Get social

Social media has provided a great way for marketers to extend the reach and impact of their advertisement well beyond the broadcast of the game by posting the ad on YouTube, running competitions and additional promotions on Facebook and creating a buzz on Twitter. This really highlights the need to marketers of all sizes to tie their promotional efforts into social media, to at least give themselves a chance to extend the conversation with consumers and try and turn them into customers.

One of the best Twitter campaigns this year comes from Mercedes-Benz, which has held what it believes is the first “Twitter-fuelled race” in history. Four teams of drivers (with Twitter-savvy celebrities as co-drivers) drove toward the Super Bowl site near Dallas from various points around the US, with the amount of fuel for each team dependent on the number of fan tweets they received.

3. Get mobile

The proliferation of smartphones means any big event is typically mirrored by a rise in phone research. Research from Lightspeed Research on the Super Bowl confirms this – 59% of viewers said they would be sending emails or SMS messages about the game and 18% said they would be will be looking at online ads from their phone, and visiting advertiser websites.

SME marketers can no longer ignore mobile platforms. When they launch a big promotion, there must be both a social media and mobile marketing component.

4. Partner with other mediums for maximum impact

If your product doesn’t work well in a mobile or social environment, find someone’s that does and partner with them. That’s the message from a Super Bowl promotion being run by Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox. The studio’s ad for the new movie Rio will be the first ad in Super Bowl history to feature an embed code, which consumers can use to unlock a special level in the popular iPhone app game, Angry Birds. Complete the level and Angry Birds players will be taken to a special competition page, where the winner will attend Rio’s world premiere in Rio de Janeiro on March 22. On the same day, Fox and app studio Rovio launch the highly anticipated “Angry Birds Rio” app.

It’s all slightly complicated and convoluted, but with 75 million downloads of Angry Birds, 20th Century Fox clearly thinks the partnership model has the chance to reach a lot of movie goers.

5. If all else fails, be funny

The best Super Bowl ads are almost always the funny ones. This year’s leading contender comes from Volkswagen, which launched its ad a few days before the Super Bowl. It ticks all the boxes – a funny kid, a nice-looking family and a bit of Star Wars. Oh, and it’s had almost 14 million views.

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