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A New Twist for Super Bowl Commercials

Every year a great deal of attention is paid to the Super Bowl commercials. In and of themselves, Super Bowl commercials have become as big an attraction as the football game. This year advertisers are expanding the reach, frequency, and effectiveness of these commercials even further.

In the past, on-air personalities and reporters in the traditional media of television, radio, and print speculated about the commercials before that year’s Super Bowl. Which advertisers were running a commercial? What would be the content of the commercials? Who would have the best and the worst? The stories about the commercials typically started mid-late week prior to Super Bowl Sunday.

Monday after the Super Bowl the talk at work and on the traditional media centered around the Super Bowl commercials. They were critiqued and evaluated by advertising experts. They were the subjects of surveys to find out what consumers thought. They were the choices of on-air personalities, anchors, and reporters as to which one they liked the best.

Each year a recap program replayed past Super Bowl commercials. That program airs again this year.

What is different for Super Bowl commercials this year is that the advertisers are releasing the commercials prior to Super Bowl Sunday. They are doing so to the traditional media. More importantly, they are releasing the commercials on social media. Some of their commercials on the social media are longer versions of the Super Bowl commercial. At least one is two minutes rather than thirty seconds.

This pre-release strategy is designed to get even more publicity, even more hype, and even more buzz to the Super Bowl commercials. Using this strategy has allowed advertisers to expand the window of opportunity for attention to their commercials not only after the Super Bowl but also before it. Half the advertisers bought into the strategy and released their ads this week.

One expert explained this strategy as being "all about the engagement of the audience." The audience that is being engaged is much larger and broader than in the past. Instead of the confines of the traditional media, this year’s audience includes anyone who has the technology to access the Internet. That is way more than traditional media offers. As of this morning, the Acrua commercial had had eight million views. Wow! Have you seen it yet? Once you do, you will remember it. They did a good job keeping the subject of the commercial front and center throughout.

The sort of comment that I just made probably piques your interest in seeing the Acura commercial. You can do that without watching the Super Bowl. YouTube has set up an Ad Blitz Program which allows you to see the Super Bowl commercials without watching the game.

Now that is getting more for your 3.5 million dollar Super Bowl commercial.

Use the opportunity and the attention to make your company’s commercial more available and easily accessible to more people than ever before. Let them find your company’s commercial at any time, before, during, and after the game. Put the control of when someone watches your company’s commercial in that person’s hands at a time convenient to him or her.

That strategy is a new twist for Super Bowl commercials.

We could all take a lesson from this strategy and expand the windows of opportunity for our marketing by using the social media site YouTube.

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