Why the So.Me cheerleaders are still waiting for some game time at the Super Bowl
After reading Mashable’s Social Media: The Final Piece of the Super Bowl Advertising Puzzle I felt compelled to undertake a quick study of the state of play out there in the Social Bowl. After all the question needs to be asked is So.Me really the Final Piece in the Super Bowl Advertising Puzzle or just freeloading by tagging along for the ride on TV’s big day out?
“Just as the invention of the forward pass changed football forever, the advent of social media has change the advertising game, and marketers must react accordingly.” - MASHABLE
An estimated 111 million people watched the Super Bowl between the Packers and the Steelers on Sunday Night. That is a new record for US TV. Beating last year’s Superbowl by 4.5 Million viewers. The regular season’s games on CBS, Fox and NBC pull around 20 million viewers.
Now let’s look at what social media has delivered.
The most popular TVC was “The Force” by Volkswagen. It has pulled just over 18 Million views and 90K+ Likes on YouTube and 615K+ ‘Viral’ Shares at the time of writing this post. Making it the most successful Social Bowl Ad of all time. These are not Super Bowl numbers but they compare favourably with the regular season’s game day ratings. The big question is the Volkswagen ad the exception to the So.Me rule or is it representative of just how far So.Me has progressed over the past 12 months? Let’s find out.
Mashable reports today that the TVC that received the most Tweets during the broadcast was a Chrysler Eminem Ad that has accumulated 2.6 Million unofficial views and 16.5K Likes on YouTube and 55K ‘Viral’ Shares at the time of writing. This ad received just under 20K tweets during the broadcast. Now compare that figure with the 111 Million viewers watching the football and it provides us with some small measure of the relative cross over influence of Social Media vs Television. At 0.0002% of the total TV broadcast audience you would be hard pressed to classify Twitter’s contribution to the campaign as little more than noise on the statistical radar. The same goes for the 16.5K Facebook Likes and the 55K ‘Viral’ Shares.
This suggests that So.Me contribution to the Super Bowl Ad Fest is far from being the Game Changer that makes it “the Final Piece in the Super Bowl Advertising Puzzle”. More like the Rookie sitting on the coach’s bench handing out the oranges and dreaming that may be next year he’ll get some game time.
Alternatively you may like to think of So.Me as one of the cheerleaders or maybe even just one of the fans basking in the reflected glory of supporting the team that has just won the Super Bowl.
In this context So.Me allows you to measure the social impact of the TVC (i.e how the fans respond to watching the ad).
So at this stage So.Me isn’t going to make a big contribution to your brand building effort but it can make a contribution to your market research data. After all it’s a lot easier to watch the game day and post match So.Me results on your ‘real time’ So.Me dashboard than to ring up 20,000 random TV viewers during the game and ask them if they ’liked’ your TV campaign.
