Is Social Media to Blame for Mediocre Super Bowl Ads?
There were several strange Super Bowl commercials this year: dancing woodland creatures, people with no pants, Betty White. The slew of Doritos ads may have had you thirsting for some Pepsi commercials. Unfortunately, you may have noticed -- if you weren't too busy filling up on wings during commercials -- Pepsi did not run an advertisement for the first time in 23 years. What may have been more surprising was Google running a spot after years of resisting traditional advertising (maybe feeling the pressures of Bing competition?).
Pepsi announced back in December that it would not be airing any Super Bowl ads with the exception of its Doritos brand, which is a part of PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay division. The company opted against spending millions of dollars for a 30-second spot on CBS, and launched an online campaign on Feb. 1. The campaign is called Pepsi Refresh Project, which pledges to donate $1 million in February and $20 million through the end of the year to social causes chosen and voted upon by fans.
The online campaign is projected to cost the soft-drink company $20 million. A nice move when compared with the $33 million Pepsi spent on Super Bowl advertising last year. According to TNS Media Intelligence, PepsiCo spent $142.8 million on 10 Super Bowl spots from 1999 to 2008.
The initiative will use social networking tools such a Facebook, Twitter, Ustream video and an iPhone application to reach out and engage the public. The announcement that Pepsi would not be featured during the Super Bowl drove buzz about the campaign. The Facebook page "Pepsi - Refresh Everything" already has 505,311 fans. Nielsen Co. reported that PepsiCo got 21.6 percent of the online chatter about Super Bowl advertisers over the last two months, which is about 10 times more than Coca-Cola, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, relying on traditional means of advertising -- TV, print and online banner ads -- doesn’t cut it anymore.
"[Online communities] allow us to build deeper relationships and deeper dialogue with our customers," Bonin Bough, PepsiCo's global director of digital and social media, told the Chronicle. "With digital media, consumers are using it in totally different ways than advertisers ever expected them to."
In a release Feb 5., Pepsi Refresh Project announced that Drew Brees was the winner of a $100,000 Pepsi Refresh grant that will help Hope Lodge, based out of New Orleans, provide rooms for cancer patients and their guardians.
Other NFL players are involved in the campaign to advocate causes voted upon by the online community.
On the flip side, Google, which traditionally uses online initiatives, threw its hat in the ring for traditional advertising. Its commercial, “Parisian Love,” debuted during the third quarter, marking the first Super Bowl advertisement the company has ever aired. The 53-second spot cost the company an estimated $6 million.
On Saturday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt tweeted: Can't wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said "Hell has indeed frozen over.")
The advertisement was not originally intended for the television medium. The video has been on YouTube.com for several months and already has upward of 1.6 million views.
"We didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search," Schmidt posted in a blog after the game. "Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience."
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