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When Every Day’s a Super Bowl (Ross Cranford Expert Advice)

4 min read

The Super Bowl is perhaps the only time that regular, everyday Americans become advertising aficionados. Ever since Apple’s legendary ad introducing the Macintosh computer during the 1984 Super Bowl, many people have tuned in as much to watch the ads as to see the game. For people in the ad industry, it’s the only time of the year our friends and neighbors respect our Mad Men expertise.

A survey conducted for the National Retail Federation showed that 78.6 percent of Americans view the commercials during the Super Bowl as entertainment; 17.7 percent say the commercials are the best part of the game.

Now YouTube, Twitter and Facebook give us access to the ads during the game, (and many times even before the game), so fans can weigh in and vote for their favorites during lulls on the field, making the spots in the commercial breaks as much a sporting event as what’s happening in the stadium.

On the Monday following, USA Today declares the winning ad. Spots that ran only once on air will be viewed millions more times online. Indeed, one of the most talked-about Super Bowl ads in recent memory was actually a tweet by Oreos when the lights in the stadium went out unexpectedly: “Power out? No problem. You can still dunk in the dark.”

Everybody knows that the Super Bowl is one of the most watched televised events of the year — 114.4 million viewers in 2015, the largest U.S. audience in history. And every client is now trying to reach customers where, increasingly, they live: on mobile devices. But as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently said, “We have a Super Bowl on mobile every day.”

Let’s think about what she’s saying for a second. First, Facebook advertising is mobile advertising — that’s where almost 80 percent of your spots will be viewed. You don’t have to go through a media-buying network and place banners on websites where viewers will see them after the click, often on sites that aren’t optimized for mobile. More than a quarter of all Web traffic is now steered through Facebook. You can place your ad directly in the Facebook feed and get potential customers before the click, capturing the eyes on the front end.

What if brands spent their money on social ads instead of a Super Bowl spot? The Wall Street Journal estimated that you could own all of the eyeballs on every social media platform — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat — for an entire day, at less than half the cost of a single 30-second spot on the Super Bowl.

And better yet, you don’t have to buy all of those hundreds of millions of Super Bowl eyeballs without regard to whom they are attached. You can purchase just the ones you want. The easiest and most basic form of social media advertising is to serve sponsored posts to your friends and followers. In most cases, though, this is preaching to the converted. Social media targeting is one of the most creative things going in advertising right now. This is where you might find today’s Don Draper, digging deep into the numbers and finding overlapping interests and audiences that drive engagement, change conversations and move markets.

The brutal truth of the earned social media vs. paid social media debate eventually comes down to how Facebook has throttled organic reach for business page posts. Without at least a token budget behind your posts, you might as well not make them, because no one will see them without actively going to your page. With targeting, you don’t even have to have a large initial following to find your audience. You can even target the audience that follows your competitors.

Big data powers targeted media. Data marketing companies like Acxiom provide the backbone of Facebook and Twitter’s targeting tools. Advertisers get the benefit of spending money to reach only their best customers. And consumers get the benefit of seeing only ads for products they’re actually interested in. Instead of being invasive and creepy, it’s actually a win-win situation.

Targeted data marketing plus social media and digital video are sounding the curtain call for interruptive advertising. As Rick Parkhill, founding producer of the Sundance Digital Storytelling Conference, recently stated, “Brands are realigning their resources to create compelling content that people actually want to consume and share. When you look at how the media world has been structured for generations, this is a tectonic shift. It is happening very quickly and applies huge pressure to create, evaluate and replicate exponentially.”

Now you can find that Super Bowl-sized audience on social media, winnow it down to just the consumers you want to reach and serve them entertaining and informative content that really matters to their lives. Advertising and marketing will never be the same again, at least until the next revolution comes along.


Ross Cranford is a partner and social media strategist at Little Rock advertising agency Cranford Co. Email him at Ross@CranfordCo.com.
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