Super Bowl Ads...A thing of the past?

Are Super Bowl Ads becoming a thing of the past? There are three things that people get excited for during the Super Bowl:

1. The game, of course. Although this year was upsetting, especially for me since I am a Broncos Fan.
2. The half-time show.  
3. The commercials, for a 30 second slot it can cost $4 million dollars. If you missed them, you can view them here.

All year long, people are trying to avoid commercials as much as possible. They do this by recording their shows and fast-forwarding through, so they can see their show uninterrupted.

However, during the Super Bowl people are looking forward to humorous, exciting advertisements. In my opinion, there weren't too many that were extremely memorable due to their humor. In this article, Brian Lowry wrote his opinion of which commercials flopped and which ones were a success. He states that some were a draw, including the only ads that stuck with me, the Tebow ads for T-Mobile.

 

With the high cost of ads, some companies are trying to do what the movie The Persuaders talks about to "break through the clutter." Companies are having to become more creative in order to persuade people. There were two companies that stood out on my Twitter feed, JC Penny and Esurance.

 

According to an article, written by Mae Anderson, Esurance saved $1.5 million by purchasing an ad that aired after the Super Bowl. If you missed the ad, then you missed your chance to tweet #EsuranceSave30 to win $1.5 million. As the article states, it has been a top trending hashtag and the number of Esurance followers has increased dramatically. I did not participate in this, but many of the people I follow were tweeting this hashtag multiple times until the deadline.



 

 

JC Penny did not run an ad during the Super Bowl and took a different approach with Twitter. Their tweets looked like drunk tweets. One tweet was "Toughdown Seadawks!! Is sSeattle going toa runaway wit h this???"

 

I saw retweets on my feed and decided to look at it more. Apparently JC Penny was promoting their Go USA Mittens, so they were #TweetingWithMittens. According to this ENews article, this is what a JCPenny spokeswoman said:

 

"We knew Twitter would be very active but wanted to find a way to stay above the Super Bowl fray and instead create our own narrative," a JCPenney spokeswoman explained to BuzzFeed. "Given it was cold, and we are selling Go USA mittens—we thought it could be a fun stunt!" 

 

 

In Mae Anderson's article, she writes that "J.C. Penney said it gained over 10,000 followers on Super Bowl Sunday, received over 40,000 @jcpenney mentions and 1,800 mentions of the hashtag #tweetingwithmittens."

 

 

Getting to consumers can be very tricky. Advertisers are having to come up with different way to reach their targets, as shown by ESurance and JC Penny. Both of these companies had an increase in followers, mentions and hashtag recognition.  It is unclear if these attempts were a complete success, but they have to find some way to be different.

 

What will we see in the future for companies that are trying to get through to consumers with all of  the other advertising clutter?