By K.C. Brown
While sports fans are still buzzing about the New York Giants' historic upset over the New England Patriots in the 2008 Super Bowl, advertisers continue to create a different kind of buzz. Super Bowl advertisers this year got serious about integrated marketing, leading their multimillion dollar ad campaigns with sophisticated public relations initiatives utilizing both traditional and new media.
Fueled by intensive promotion starting weeks before the game, news media coverage of the advertisements aired on Super Bowl Sunday reached an all-time high. According to a study by Cision, broadcast news organizations aired 6,846 stories about the 2008 Super Bowl ads in the 10 weeks before and after this year's game, reaching more than 750 million television news viewers--above and beyond the hundreds of millions of consumers who viewed the ads on game day.
The number of news stories aired every year on Super Bowl advertising has increased more than tenfold since 2004. Weary of seeing millions of dollars expended solely on the one-shot, one-minute-wonders that their showcase ads had become, major brands are depending increasingly on an integrated marketing mix to deliver ever more bang for the Super Bowl buck. Instead of confining their campaigns to ads airing on a single Super Sunday, marketers start with PR on the ads weeks in advance, reaching millions of YouTube viewers, inhabitants of the blogosphere and consumers of mainstream media with campaigns that take on a life of their own over a period of more than two months.
These Super Bowl campaigns provide a best-practices tutorial in using PR to drive successful integrated marketing initiatives. All of them employ a common methodology that can be described by the old wisdom on how to make a speech: "Tell them what you're going to tell them; tell it to them; then summarize what you've just told them."
1. Tell them what you're going to tell them: In the early years of the Super Bowl ad derby, marketers kept their most creative work under wraps to deliver a big bang on the day of the game. But blogs and social media, especially YouTube and other video-posting sites, have changed the game completely. Early disclosure and promotion can pay big benefits by starting a viral buzz about the news you will be making.
By posting their new Super Bowl ads on YouTube and other public sites weeks in advance of the game and then alerting the media, the major brands this year succeeded in creating a viral news phenomenon. Tens of thousands of bloggers discussed the ads and fueled millions of visits to the public video-sharing sites where the ads appeared. The mainstream media quickly caught on, with news coverage of the ads rapidly rising in the six weeks before the game, cresting on Super Bowl Sunday and Monday, and gradually receding through a wave of follow-up stories in the four weeks after the game.
2. Tell it to them: As the world's largest event-marketing vehicle, the Super Bowl demonstrates the relevance and enduring power of "manufactured news." While webinars, podcasts, online chats, e-mail and other virtual tools have made traditional press conferences less necessary than in the past, marketers still find real value in staging events different or creative enough to make their own news.
For example, Apple is known for building suspense and hype surrounding events where it launches new products, fostering awareness and sales momentum. Similarly, auto manufacturers continue to have success with events at auto shows surrounding introduction of concept cars; new model lines are meant to create a feeding frenzy in the trade and consumer media. The focus on the competition to produce the best Super Bowl ad has become an event in its own right.
As in past years, even though most had been aired on the Web weeks in advance, and many had elicited mixed reviews for their creativity, this year's ads once again were a newsworthy social, cultural and entertainment event, reaching hundreds of millions of additional consumers through the news coverage they generated.
3. Summarize what you've just told them: There is a growing awareness, especially by the business-oriented broadcast and print media, that major marketing events are more than a one-day story. Stories now live year-round on the Web--on YouTube, in the blogosphere and in the online media. An ongoing marketing campaign that gets off on the right foot can continue to generate news months after the initial event. The Super Bowl ads drive tremendous media coverage in the weeks after the event as critics rate them for creativity and effectiveness. User-generated content (UGC) is also a means of keeping a story alive, with major advertisers encouraging customers to create their own ads, post them on YouTube, and compete for prizes, with the competitions getting broad coverage by the news media. All of this post-event activity enables savvy integrated marketers to repeat and reinforce their messages by engaging in ongoing conversations over extended periods with consumers in ways that best position their offers.
The lesson behind the Super Bowl advertisers' success is that PR and other communications activities can turbo-charge a major marketing event by engaging audiences in multiple ways over long periods of time. The bigger the brand and the bigger the marketing challenge, the more important it is to find ways to ensure a positive return on investment. Leveraging traditional media as well as the blogosphere, YouTube, social media, online media and other channels, the 2008 Super Bowl advertisers used public relations to get integrated marketing right. Along the way, they provided an object lesson for other marketers of all sizes. PRN
CONTACT:
K.C. Brown is vice president of U.S. operations at Cision, the media research, distribution and evaluation services organization. He can be reached at 203.663.2438.