Sunday, February 7, 2010

From TV to Internet: Commercials at Super Bowl 2010!

Hurray for the New Orleans Saints! Their first Super Bowl trophy in their franchise history! They really pulled out a fantastic show starting from the unexpected twist at the beginning of the second half, that was a real momentum builder, and from that point they just rocked! Cheers also for the four Trojan alumni on the two teams that played tonight! Fight on, Trojans!

Twitter went out of capacity during the Super Bowl Game!

Besides the football game itself, the excessive TV commercials have also become another star in the 4 hour long Super Bowl game! Before the Super Bowl started, Pepsi's decision to withdraw from airing Super Bowl TV commercial and instead invest in social media has attracted so much attention. To some extent, it also helped show how expensive commercial advertisements for these Super Bowl are! After all, this is the most-watched TV event in America, and every second on TV is worths tens of thousands dollars! Advertisers, watch out for how you spend these seconds!

When I was watching the Super Bowl, I was also tweeting, and I noticed on Twitter that the Twitter trend in Los Angeles area showed "super bowl commercials" and "bowl commercials" as among the top ten tweeted key words, which reveals how talked about these TV commercials are! At one point during the game, Twitter was out of capacity! Too many people were tweeting! Here is the picture I captured to record this historical moment:

Fail Whale! Yay!

Three trends from Super Bowl TV Commercials:

Among all these million-dollar commercials, there are definitely many "awww" ones and many "what a waste of the money" ones, and also some pant-less ones out there. One trend I observed is that today so many brands are using TV commercials to direct their viewers to their website for more information, at the end of most brands' TV commercials there is usually a link to their websites. Among brands advertising their website were Lexus, NFL, Doritos, Kmart, and companies ranging from every industry. It almost feels like these 30 second commercials are like movie trailers saying, "Wanna watch the whole show? Go to our websites!"

Another trend is that more and more websites and online services are using TV commercials to tap into the mass audience of traditional media, such as Google.com (first ever Super Bowl commercial!), Monster.com, GoDaddy.com, Homeaway.com, Carmax.com, Etrade.com. I especially felt Etrade.com (I have to say their commercial using talking babies are kinda freaky though) and Carmax.com were the two biggest online players with Super Bowl TV Commercials, and the number of their ads almost tied with the number of automobile commercials! Who says that New Media has to always be at war with Traditional Media like TV? They could totally help each other out in some circumstances, just like tonight!

Another interesting trend about the Super Bowl Commercials is that some brands do not just use their TV commercials to direct the viewers to their official webpage, but to their social media webpage like Facebook.com. Honda's TV commercial served as an intro to their Facebook campaign: Everbody knows somebody who loves a Honda! Most of my friends and family drive Toyota, and I really do not know anyone around me who loves a Honda, but after I participated in their Facebook connection, I did find a friend on the Facebook page who does love Honda, ha, I guess their theory proves true with me! Good job, Honda!

Here is my list for Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials:

The Best: My heart went to the well-crafted, little romantic love story told by the Google commercial, very succinct, very neat, very Google:


Thumbs up: Coca-cola, Honda, Monster.com, Teleflora, Intel, Motorola, KIA

Thumbs down:

Most of those Bud and Bud-light beer commercials were just really silly (in a bad way) and made people who drink Bud Light look really bad!

The worst of the worst:

Vizio Forge: it is sooooo dark, and sooooo scary!

Chrysler's Dodge Charger: you don't need to make life feel so dull and miserable just to contrast the joy men may get from driving your car, very depressing!

For people who missed these commercial, you can go to Hulu adzone to review the commercials and vote for your favorite ones! Hulu scores this one! yay!


1 comment:

  1. 100% agree that Google was my favorite ad. This is a great summary of the best and worst Super Bowl ads. My other favorite was the Simpsons for Coke.

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