Superbowl Airtime nearly sold out.

Superbowl airtime on CBS is nearly sold out.
At 5 million usd for 30 seconds, that's a bonanza for CBS.

And it shows just how important the Superbowl is in American Psyche. 

Nevermind the audience numbers, the brand association is extremely positive allowing the kudos of being part of the party. Of course too, it allows a whole creative opportunity online to get engagement for the "best Superbowl Ad" and commentary.

But it's not cheap....

Superbowl 2015 hype falls.

Incredibly little buzz about the annual Superbowl advertising. Normally, under two weeks out (it's on Feb 1), you'd see far more activity.

Fewer advertisers are revealing their ads in advance and in fact, there seems to be fewer advertisers give the 4.5 million usd spot rate. It's not sold out yet and car advertising is down by 50% but that price is 500k greater than any previous record.

Those that have shown their ads in advance, are getting low views online with Victoria's Secret topping that list at a mere 800,000 views. That's not great.

Online searches for Superbowl ads are down too. 

Broadcast by NBC, it's likely that the live audience won't diminish and at 111 million viewers last year, that's healthy. It was the most watched TV broadcast in US history.

So the buzz that's lacking, has to be about the price and the fact that spots are still available, indicates that. So it's too expensive as what is, a gamble. The creative needs to be good and that costs too.

But on a single 30 second spot basis, advertisers are questioning the value. And it seems that the public are getting bored with the advertising hype. 

Superbowl Commercials were 4 million dollars for 30 seconds. Good value?

Superbowl commercials cost an average of 4 million usd for 30 seconds. But of course, the build-up on Social media and the 'excitement' that a new commercial brings, means that these Ads get a reach far beyond the showing on the night.

This year the controversy around Scarlett Johansson's commercial for Sodastream, shows how that impact can be extended. It made the front pages of a lot of newspapers and TV/Social media comment. Most advertisers release ads, about the ads, as previews to gain Social Media traction.

Doritos of course, get fans to write their Superbowl commercials, giving the campaign "legs" before airing.

Justifying the return is tough without that level of cut-through because the spots are expensive (Budweiser took 2 x 60 second spots this year = circa 16 million usd) so you have to grab the opportunity as Apple did in 1984.

Newcastle Brown Ale (you'll see it on this blog below) actually captured the Superbowl hype without having a commercial in the game. Real guerrilla tactics.

The top 5 Advertisers in the last 5 years are Budweiser, Pepsi, Hyundai, Chrysler and Coke in that order by expenditure. Interesting data from The Financial Times which shows that in order to get a return on that investment, Coke would need to sell 5.7m cans...but I think there's a point too about brand. They need to be seen as having a presence at The Superbowl in order to be quintessentially, pro-American.

Can the heritage of Budweiser for example, not be in The Superbowl?
It's a brand that's all part of Americana.

But is it worth it? 
You better believe it when it's done cleverly.

In some ways, The Superbowl is a must have for brands that need the endorsement of American culture. It's more than just spot-buying, rather, an involvement in American society. 

You can't stuff indie cred down a male strippers g string. Indeed you can't. Hot Superbowl Commercial.

The best Superbowl commercial I've seen this year that isn't in fact, a Superbowl commercial. In fact it isn't even a commercial. 

Great little ambush though....and a great Anna Kendrick performance. 

Good work Newcastle.

Superbowl Power Outage. Brands really capitalised on it with Social Media. Full marks to Oreo, Jim Beam, Tide and 6 others.

Full marks to Mashable too, out quick with a great story about brands who capitalised on Superbowl Social Media without paying for the expensive commercials. And great too, because it showed brands who were literally, thinking on their feet.

You may (or may not) have been watching The Superbowl, as I was, and as it entered the third quarter, a blackout/power cut ensued. The game stopped and the stadium went into darkness. Out then popped the top Ad for Oreo on Social Media, 4 minutes after the blackout - "No power? No problem.You can still dunk in the dark". Super. And I've no idea how they got it ready so quickly.

Next up was Tide with this...

And then Jim Beam who have a brand called 'Black'.....

Other brands got in too. Calvin Klein with a video of a fairly hunky man doing press ups under the headline, "Since the lights are still out..."

PBS, the Broadcaster, (the excellent broadcaster), tweeted that viewers shouldn't worry because they had 'Downton Abbey' on instead.

Walgreens tweeted that they had candles for sale.

And Audi said they were going to send some of their LED lights to the stadium.

They were also bidding immediately (especially brands like Bud Light) for Adwords 'power outage' and 'blackout'. How brilliant that is.

Fairly great that Agencies and their Clients were that alert to capitalising on something that they couldn't have predicted. Pretty smart thinking. And good energy.

It was a touch-and-go game at the end with Baltimore's Ravens winning what has become a really fabulous spectacle. 

A magnificent night in New Orleans.

Superbowl Ads. Expensive airtime, super Ads and probably the most watched TV programme ever in The USA.

Tonight is Superbowl Sunday - just in case you've been in a cave (!) and haven't heard. What makes it exciting is ad watching. A lot of brands are now launching "teasers" in advance of the game to get you "teased" to look out for the final version. This one for Samsung (in two parts) looks terrific and titled "the next big thing". At 2 minutes, I'm guessing they'll spend about 12 million just on the one Superbowl broadcast alone. Is it worth it? Have a look but I think it's a great spot (Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd are very well known stateside). The second part is great and below.

Possibly the most expensive airtime on the planet in terms of overall cost per commercial (3.7 million usd a piece) but not per capita. Interesting for example, that Ireland's own Late Late Show is more expensive per viewer than The Superbowl. Because even though you pay 3.7 million for a Superbowl spot, you reach about 200 million people who will watch at least part of the game (mainly the 3rd and 4th quarters so end spots can be more valuable). The final Samsung commercial is going out, for example, in the 4th quarter.

Consequently based on a standard trade measure of cost-per-thousand CPT (the cost of reaching one thousand viewers) Superbowl does very well in value terms because the audience is so huge. Therefore, all spots are well sold out.

About 130 million will watch the game end-to-end and that will make it the most watched US TV programme ever. Because the content (American Football) limits it to US viewer appeal, it doesn't reach the viewing heights of sports with global appeal like Soccer. About half the planet for example, watch The World Cup Final, putting the viewer numbers in billions.

So a lot of us will watch the Ads and, as I've blogged over the last couple of days, the Ads can really make a difference as the "Dart Vader/Star Wars" spot did for VW last year. Already over 200 million viral views. 'Doritos' and recently 'Go Daddy' largely built brand recognition with their Superbowl spots as indeed did Steve Jobs choose it to launch his new Apple Mac in the 1984 Superbowl.

It's a huge night for advertising and social media nevermind, for football.

Olympic online data just in from BBC. 34 million unique viewers on their site alone. Astonishing numbers.

You don't think the world has changed? Have a look at the video highlights of the London games 1908. Don't you love the Ladies tennis?

I know were all finished with, what was to be fair, excellent Olympic games. And this is the last time I'll mention them.

However, the BBC have just released social data about how well their online business performed and it's not unreasonable to use it as a typical benchmark.

It covers 2 weeks when 34 million unique users, saw BBC coverage online. 34 million online visitors. Astonishing.

On their busiest day it delivered one quadrillion bytes of data (yeah, it's a lot) and that busiest day was when Brit, Bradley Wiggins (Tour de France winner and secret smoker) won gold on August 1st.

After the opening and closing ceremonies, the men's 100m final was most watched (Usain Bolt) both on and offline globally.

They keep referring to these Games as "the digital games" and these results show that's exactly what they were.

In one 24 hour period, the online BBC traffic was higher for them than the total hours online for the 2010 World Cup! They also looked at device usage and saw it was generally, PC's during the day, Mobile usage from 6pm and then Tablets took over from circa 9pm.

The other benefit of this of course, is that they introduced BBC online to a new audience whom might very well comeback. It's really a superb performance but clearly shows consumers preferring to watch/follow online. It's further proof of the domination of Social and all things digital.

According to NBC (whom you might remember really messed up and if not, go here http://streamabout.blogspot.ie/2012/07/nbc-olympics-and-way-brands-can-easily.html), these games were the most watched TV event in history as well. So online got its share too or you might say, online viewers made it the most watched TV event. 

According to Nielsen, 219 million people watched some part of the games in the US alone (a viewer they consider as someone who watches 6 minutes or more). The Superbowl by contrast, gets circa 100 million viewers.

The closing ceremony had 31m viewers.

Irish broadcaster RTE, hasn't got data yet but indicated, based on data usage, it had 3,500 online at one time to watch an event. Which seems to me incredibly low? Katie Taylor? Oh sorry, that's right, their server went down just before broadcast.

In Canada, each Canadian watched 21 hours on average. 

Of course all Press titles saw increases and generally an uplift in advertising.
But all in all, this was the watershed event for online viewing and for Social Media. There's no doubt about it that it made online an intuitive place to go and almost "normal".

It shows how well planned media can generate new traffic and sell more ads by using online effectively. People are prepared to go online and watch something if it's good and will do so in huge numbers.

Extraordinary numbers that will pale by the time we get to Rio.