Tag: super bowl

Two Brands Go For Twitter’s Million-Dollar Branded Emojis For Super Bowl

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch are among the latest brands to get their own branded emojis on Twitter, just in time for their Super Bowl campaigns this Sunday. Pepsi created an emoji of a Pepsi can surrounded by music notes to accompany the #PepsiHalftime hashtag, whereas Anheuser-Busch created two emojis for Budweiser and Bud Light to liven up their respective Twitter campaigns. Sources say that Twitter reserves these bespoke emojis for its biggest advertisers, asking for a “seven-figure” price for them as a bundle deal in conjunction with its other ad products such as Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and the newly introduced Promoted Moments.

What Brands Need To Do
Ever since Twitter came out with the first branded emoji for Coca-Cola, we anticipated it would sell more of the new ad unit. Now with the million-dollar asking price, it seems fair to say that Twitter has established branded emojis as a premium ad product. It remains to be seen whether Twitter will expand the availability of such custom emojis in the future, but for now, it has become a costly but flashy sparkle for brands to add atop their Twitter campaigns.

 

Source: AdWeek

Visa Integrates With Super Bowl App For Mobile Payments In Stadium

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Visa announced today that its mobile payment service Visa Checkout will be integrated into the official Super Bowl 50 app to allow attendees at Levi’s Stadium to order and pay for drinks without leaving their seats. As a long-time sponsor of the NFL, Visa has also installed over 700 point-of-sale terminals in the stadium to let fans purchase NFL merchandise by simply tapping their phones.

What Brands Need To Do
Through this Visa Checkout integration, the NFL is bringing a digitally enhanced experience to its games. Together, mobile payments and other mobile and location-based tools can open up new opportunities for event organizers and brand sponsors to effectively connect with the audience via their smartphones during live events.

 

Source: AdAge

CBS To Bundle Broadcast And Streaming Ad Sales For Super Bowl

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
CBS has confirmed its plan to sell all national ad spots for next year’s Super Bowl as a package deal with its corresponding stream’s ad units during the game. CBS will not allow advertisers to opt out of the latter, which are conventionally sold separately from the broadcast units. As a result, all national ads that plays during the game will be live-streamed as well.

Market Impact
According to NBC, over 1.3 million people watched this year’s Super Bowl via its streaming service, a number that will most likely increase next year as U.S. viewers continue to adopt OTT streaming services, but still pales in comparison to the over 114 million viewers who watched it on TV. Therefore, it is understandable that only 18 of more than 70 Super Bowl advertisers opted to put their commercials in the live-stream this year, and NBC allegedly had some difficulty selling all of its separate streaming inventory, according to an AdAge report.

CBS’s decision may set an important precedent and become common. “We expect bundling of broadcast and streaming ad sales to catch on, at least for the sports events that draw sizeable live audiences that are the most important and attractive for advertisers,” says Brian Hughes, SVP, Audience Analysis Practice Lead at Magna Global. “This approach unifies the viewer experience across platforms, and simplifies both the sales process and the viewership metrics which, for these events, are based on reach, not targeting.”

 

Source: Variety

Super Bowl: No Blackout, Yet Another Twitter Record

Posted on by Lab Team

Last year’s Super Bowl set the record for tweets, with 24.1 million tweets out on the social network over the course of the game. Many attributed that to the infamous blackout, and the several real-time marketing campaigns that ensued. However, that hypothesis seems to be undone as Super Bowl XLVIII generated 24.9 million tweets, while no culturally significant “event” occurred during the game. The highest peak was Percy Harvin’s 87-yard kickoff return in the third quarter, which generated 381,605 Tweets Per Minute; another high point was the halftime show. Another trend: ads featuring hashtags. This year, 58% of all ads during the game had affiliated hashtags, up from 50% last year. The data on advertisement engagement is still out, but it’s clear that Twitter remains the number one social network for the Super Bowl, and is indeed solidifying its position. 

Brands Who Release Super Bowl Ads Early Win Big

Posted on by Lab Team

The Super Bowl is still fresh in the minds of advertisers as they slowly determine the returns on their advertising dollars.  The reach of an ad doesn’t stop at the end of the game, though, and online views have become increasingly important to the overall success of a campaign.  Analytics firm Visible Measures looked at online “True Reach” statistics for every Super Bowl campaign since 2010 and found that advertisers who released their ads online before the game saw far greater reach than those who didn’t. Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” commercial from this year’s bowl had already received 26.7 million views before the game, and its final reach is expected to be much higher.

Does The Super Bowl Mark The Start Of 4K Adoption?

Posted on by Lab Team

It’s easy to herald this the age of 4K after CES this month, but like 3D TV before it, it’s going to come down to whether or not there’s actual content in 4K that makes a genuine difference for users. So this Super Bowl, Fox is aiming to get ahead of 4K by showcasing its 4K camera capabilities. The stream for TV will be in 720p resolution, but at the big game there will be four 4K cameras that will help capture images in what Fox is calling “Super Zoom” – essentially, they’ll zoom in 720p to get hi-res zoom. The idea, for next season, is to get 8K cameras so that when they zoom and stream regularly it will be in 4K, so Fox is in essence preparing this resolution trick to be scaled up. It means that 4K might actually make a difference to sports fans in the near future, and as sports are a big driver of hi-res TV sales, the TV manufacturers who put money into 4K designs will be happy to hear about Fox’s utilization of the technology.

Super Bowl & Social Media

Posted on by Lab Team

As we’ve already seen with the Sherman incident, social media and the Super Bowl go hand in hand. As agencies think strategically about how to leverage that data, CrowdTap has just released a survey about social media users during the big game: the majority of viewers are going to record impressions on social media before, during, and after the game. 61% of those surveyed said that they’ll share ads on social media as well, and 41.2% said that they’ll be on social media the whole game. The social media of choice? Facebook: 55.8% say they’ll be primarily on the social network site. Most importantly: 59.1% say they’re interested in brands, while 46.8% say that brands they like will make announcements. Though it’s unlikely that advertisers will take these statistics into account this year, they point to a wide margin for success in getting campaigns to broad audiences quickly through digital means. The companies who leverage this potent interest will ultimately be the ones who come out successful. 

Oreo Blackout Ad Was Only the Beginning

Posted on by Lab Team

Oreo’s marketing touchdown during the Super Bowl has managed to rock more than just Twitter, and has foreshadowed what may be the future of marketing in general: brands reacting via social media to breaking news to compliment more traditional methods.  Every marketing agency in the world that let a collective sigh after the perfect Oreo ad went viral and became a news sensation as much as the blackout that triggered it watched and learned from the example, and examples of the new wave of social advertising are already cropping up.  After winter storm Nemo struck the east coast, Starbucks generated targeted posts in areas where local Starbucks stores had been forced to close by weather, offering free coffee.  As part of a multi-pronged approach, this sort of reactive marketing is seen as the way of the future, and during major media events of the next year, it is certain brands will be watching and waiting for their Oreo-Blackout moment.

Despite Ad Controversy, GoDaddy Sees Biggest Sales Day In History

Posted on by Lab Team

Although yesterday we reported
that GoDaddy.com’s Ad “Perfect Match” was almost universally panned
on Twitter, yesterday’s sales told a markedly different story. The company
reported that the Monday after the game was the biggest sales day in company
history; hosting sales jumped 45%, dot-com domain sales rose 40%, new mobile
customers increased by 35%, and 10,000 total customers were added yesterday
alone. So today, even though their strategy ran against the conventional wisdom
that social media success and engagement means better sales, it seems though
sheer visibility won out as new users flocked to the service. 

Super Bowl Tweets 30% Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

Last night there were precisely 20.9 million Super-Bowl related Tweets, and nearly 30% of those weren’t about the game – they were about the action between the snaps. In total, for every seven tweets about the game there were two about the ads, and the winner for most twitter action of the game was GoDaddy.com, who clocked in at 290,000 tweets – nearly six times as many as Audi, who came in last at about 50,000. However, just because they got more action on the social network doesn’t mean they were necessarily viewed positively: 80% of tweets that mentioned Audi were positive, while just 14% of GoDaddy.com’s mentions were similarly supportive. So although Audi pumped about $150 dollars into every mention on twitter – as compared to GoDaddy.com’s $25, Audi only paid about $1,500 per new follower, as compared to GoDaddy’s $6,500; indeed, Audi netted over 6,500 new followers last night while GoDaddy.com attracted just over 1,000.

So, it doesn’t necessarily pay to be the most mentioned Ad on Twitter. In the end, Taco Bell’s hashtag #livemas was the most mentioned, and they got the highest ROI from a twitter perspective. Success in terms of followers and positive social response ultimately won the night, not controversial advertising.