Tonight, I watched the Super Bowl in Florida, during the iMedia Brand Summit. That basically means, I got to watch the Super Bowl with 200+ marketers. It’s a very different viewing experience than watching with your friends and family who aren’t involved in marketing, advertising, technology, digital or social media. I’ll let Mashable and every other major publication cover the lessons learned, best ads vs worst ads, winners vs losers, etc. They’re much better at it than I am. That said, I wanted to touch on 3 very quick observations.

1. It’s 2012 and not much as changed when it comes to “TV” and digital calls to action. Since circa 1997 digital folks have been begging their clients and traditional creative teams to include a URL in the ad. The traditional thinkers obliged around 2000 by putting the URL in the last frame and in 2 pt font (something a bit larger than legal lines in ads). The argument for not including it throughout the entire commercial or in a larger font is generally something esoteric like, “we don’t want to interrupt the viewing experience” or “adding the URL at the very end is the perfect bookend to the commercial; they’ll be more apt to take action when it’s the last thing they see.” Both are hogwash. It’s 2013 and URLs, when they’re included, are still on the last frame and are still barely above a 2 pt font size. When they weren’t included, hashtags were. Roughly 50% of marketers chose a hashtag to be included in their ads. Awesome. Makes sense, given all the 2nd screen usage during the game. But, 2013 is just like 2000. Yes, hashtags were included, but they were included in the very last frame and in small font sizes. Sigh. As an industry, we still haven’t evolved.
2. Including paid search to surround your Super Bowl marketing efforts, was something overlooked by many advertisers, 10 years ago. In my favorite example of how much of a mistake it was to forget about pad search during the Super Bowl, check out this post from AdAge about Ford and GM, from 2006. Yes, even 7 years ago, we were still making the same mistakes. This year, I’d say most marketers had paid search accounted for. But, they traded their former misses in SEM with not being tuned in to the real-time needs in social. Here’s a great example of what Oreo, Walgreens and Audi (in my opinion the best presence during the Super Bowl across all touch-points) did during the Super Bowl…when the lights went out. It’s impressive for a multitude of reasons, but to me, what impresses the most, is how well there organizations must be wired to move that quickly. Speed, in social, wins. It always has. But, today, it’s not just speed, in social. It’s speed in everything you do in marketing.
3. Marketers get more amped about the intricacies of what a brand did or didn’t do during the Super Bowl. The average consumer, in my humble opinion, doesn’t seem to care. When I looked at my own person social feeds on twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. it was clear that those talking about the ads the most were marketers, not “regular” people. The regular people were talking about the game, the half-time show and occasionally talked about the ads. When they did talk about the ads, it was generally a simple statement that made it clear they either liked or didn’t like the ad. It makes you think for a second, why do we listen to the arm-chair advice from other marketers, when it’s our consumers who we’re trying to connect with?

I think this was the first real-time and multi-screen Super Bowl. We saw it in the ads, the calls to action, the speed in brand responses and how consumers voiced their thoughts. The bar is higher than it’s ever been. If you’re going to spend roughly $4 million dollars on a Super Bowl ad, you need to think about the real total cost to cover social media monitoring, real-time content, the supporting digital elements, etc. Stepping on to the biggest stage isn’t just the media cost and the cost to produce the spot. There’s so much more. Consider that fact when you plan out, not just next year’s Super Bowl campaign, but frankly, every campaign you do.

There’s been a lot of discussion about Groupon’s Super Bowl ad from Crispin, Porter + Bogusky.  The ads were deemed offensive.

I won’t get into a debate, here, about whether people just need to learn to laugh or if the ads were really offensive. Regardless of what I believe, enough people complained to make Groupon CEO, Andrew Mason, write:

Five days have passed since the Super Bowl, and one thing is clear – our ads offended a lot of people. Tuesday I posted an explanation, but as many of you have pointed out, if an ad requires an explanation, that means it didn’t work.

We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted. We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads . . . .

Insensitivity aside, the real reason the Groupon ad missed the mark is because it had NO offer. Think about that. Groupon is a site that’s all about deals. It’s about giving you an amazing offer. The ad focused on telling that story through irony and humor…but without an offer. How do you take to the biggest stage in advertising and not hit the world over the head with what makes your company unique? Does this really surprise you though when you realize that Crispin is their agency? More mind boggling is this quote from Mason, defending CP+B:

The firm that conceived the ad, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, strives to draw attention to the cultural tensions created by brands. When they created this Hulu ad, they highlighted the idea that TV rots your brain, making fun of Hulu. Our ads highlight the often trivial nature of stuff on Groupon when juxtaposed against bigger world issues, making fun of Groupon. Why make fun of ourselves? Because it’s different – ads are traditionally about shameless self promotion, and we’ve always strived to have a more honest and respectful conversation with our customers. We would never have run these ads if we thought they trivialized the causes – even if we didn’t take them as seriously as we do, what type of company would go out of their way to be so antagonistic?

On one hand, I applaud Groupon for sticking by their agency. Many organizations would have thrown their agency under the bus. Well done Mr. Mason for realizing you hired them, you signed off on the strategy (if there was one) and you approved the creative. But, on the other hand, you support the work from CP+B, but basically saying, “well yeah, I mean that’s why we went to them, because they you know creative controversy.”

Well, while CP+B was busy helping you create controversy, it also helped you miss the right strategy and took you away from your brand’s DNA. You spent $3,000,000 to introduce your brand to 25 million people during the Super Bowl and you didn’t bring an offer to the table? Talk about a lack of call to action.

Spoke with the good folks over at KDKA yesterday morning about the role social will or won’t play in the Super Bowl.  You can listen to the full audio here:

I think, in short, we are going to see a lot of great examples of brands just not really understanding what it means to be social.  It’s more than simply asking customers to vote on which ad they want to see, or to like a Facebook page to see special content.  Unfortunately, just like websites in 1999, we need to get ready for a lot of really good case studies about brands and their agencies doing bad things.  As I wrote here a little while back, there will be a variety of mistakes made, but I think ultimately, with regards to social, the biggest mistake will be not surrounding it with enough media to drive awareness of what these brands are doing in the social space.

As a side bet, I’ll take the over on 25, for the number of “social” logos inserted at the end of the commercials.

The Super Bowl is nearly upon us.  Ok, it’s 3 months away and that can seem far.  But, in the world of advertising agencies and marketers, it’s right around the corner.  Ads are in production, marketing plans are in place, media buys are being finalized and pundits like myself are getting ready to analyze the work.  We’re going to see a lot of ads.  We’re going to see a lot of brands spending $3 million for those precious 30 seconds of time.  At $100,000 per second you’d think all the i’s would be dotted and the t’s crossed, but Super Bowl advertising often lacks hubris.  It’s the time for the agency to make a push for their awards and a time for marketers/brands to “stick out.”  We are seduced by the sexiness of the Super Bowl spot.  That seduction often blinds us…and year after year, advertisers make the same mistakes even though those mistakes are covered in Super Bowl ad coverage recaps the day after.

With that said, here’s 10 mistakes I guarantee you will be made:

1. The call to action (URL, SMS, etc.) will be too small and come at the end of the ad
2. Paid search to drive people, interested in the ad or who remember the ad, won’t be bought
3. The ads won’t be uploaded to youTube or be made easily shareable
4. There will be too much emphasis on Facebook
5. Mobile optimized sites will be forgotten…instead Flash heavy experiences will be used
6. For new products, proper blog seeding won’t be executed – creating a sea of emptiness for organic search results
7. Proper load balancing for their hosting environment won’t be implemented – this will mean someone’s site will go down and people wanting to get an offer won’t be able to
8. A celebrity will be used in the ad and that celebrity will end up getting into “trouble” shortly thereafter – causing the brand/marketer to apologize and/or pull the ad
9. Social media listening platforms and strategies won’t be in place to provide real time sentiment analysis or a starting point for relationship building with “fans”
10. The same ad will be used for pre-roll and online advertising, despite the fact, data exists to prove that doing this is not as successful as using video content developed specifically for the web

Remember this post.  Bookmark it.  File it away.  Then, after the Super Bowl revisit it and let’s see if I was right.