Super Bowl Advertising 2.0

CBS
At first we were going to ignore CBS promos as part of our judging, but we saw a glaring blunder on their part. Throughout the game, CBS was promoting a TV show (Criminal Minds) that would air following the game. In last night's episode, the plot included a murder mystery in which the killer posts video of his murders on the internet. We could not believe that CBS and the creators of the show missed the opportunity to use the best promotional space on television-the Super Bowl-to create a cross-platform cliffhanger to get people to check out the video online and then stay tuned to CBS to watch the show after the game.

Nationwide Insurance
Nationwide Insurance put out a pretty funny commercial starring waste-of-space, celebrity-by-circumstance, ex-Britney-toy Kevin Federline. K-Fed clearly has a sense of humor and is playing up his fifteen minutes, but Nationwide doesn't seem to understand their audience or marketing vehicles at all. First of all, Kevin Federline is probably best recognized by the celebrity gawker tabloid readers and the younger pop-culture audience. Are these the people who are buying insurance? Let's assume that Nationwide was using this opportunity to educate the younger demographics-but then why didn't they tie the TV spot into their online campaign? If you go to their website they have a pretty nice online campaign starring K-Fed. How did they not tie the two platforms together? They were one of the few advertisers to not have a web address on their TV spot, despite the efforts they made to create a complimentary online campaign.

TBD: Revlon
Revlon did a spot starring Sheryl Crow that ended with a semi-call-to-action to get follow-up content on iTunes. We leave this as a "TBD" because we gave them huge props for being the only advertiser to tie in iTunes, but it wasn't clear to us what they were trying to do. We went to the Apple website, which didn't say anything about the campaign. We also went to Revlon's site; it, too, left us hanging. We then opened up iTunes and went into the store and saw a small banner, which led us to download a single song. There might be something we are missing or there might be more to come, but as for now, Revlon resembles the characteristics of a loser for this tremendous missed opportunity.

So what did we learn? Well, first, don't tell your editor that you are doing a top ten list until you are certain you can actually fill it. And second, if you are going to put your guests to work, ask them first or at least give them Chinese food. Most importantly though, we saw that while there's a lot of buzz in new media circles about social networking, virtual worlds, and user-generated content, the people who write the really big checks don't see the world in the same way. That difference in perspective should remind those in the new media space need to think more realistically when developing businesses, and should encourage those in the advertising space to better integrate campaigns across platforms to keep up with their ever-evolving customers. And to sell insurance, hire a duck, a gecko, a caveman, or K-Fed as your spokesperson.