Companies spend millions of dollars on their ads for the Super Bowl. A 30-second spot in last night’s broadcast cost an average of $3.5 million dollars. But the tradeoff is that Super Bowl ad time also exposes a brand to an enormous audience. 111.3 million people tuned in last night – many of whom focus much more on the ads than they would during a normal TV broadcast.
With so much at stake, you would think that companies would do everything possible to maximize their impact. But last night, only a handful of the night’s many commercials engaged users on their mobile phones. That’s in spite of the fact that mobile calls-to-action are an extremely cost-effective way to engage an audience of millions of supporters.
Mobile Commons paid particularly close attention to the commercials, and here’s what we learned:
- The only true mobile “call to action” came from the NFL itself, which asked fans to text in to join their fantasy football league.
- Go Daddy had a QR code at the end of one of their two ads.
- Chase and the NFL both promoted their mobile apps, and Bud Light promoted a free song that could be downloaded through the mobile app Shazam.
And that was it.
Most people watch the Super Bowl socially, with their mobile phones in their pockets; it’s the rare few who watch the big game plastered to a computer screen. Yet companies will often add in website names or Facebook pages that the average viewer will have forgotten long before he or she makes it back to a computer.
Asking a viewer to text in (for example, “Text CAR to 877877 to find a Hyundai dealer near you”) provides the viewer the opportunity to take immediate action. It’s a chance to turn a one-off engagement into an ongoing relationship. And it reaches out to everyone – not just those few with smartphones or high speed Internet access.
It’s also extremely effective. Research shows that SMS calls-to-action at the end of a TV commercial are 325% more effective than other types of calls-to-action, such as including a web address.
As the world turns increasingly towards their mobile phones, the dearth of mobile integrations last night was a major missed opportunity.