• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, February 6, 2012

My Super Bowl runneth over. I have to admit that for someone who didn’t even know what teams were playing at this year’s big game until kickoff, mobile media helped make the event genuinely fun this year.

I will save for tomorrow’s more reflective Mobile Insider column my experiences working the second-screen apps during the telecast. And you can see our spot checks with both mobile providers and fellow mobile media watchers in our overnight reports in Mobile Marketing Daily. But I will share today a brief glimpse at the comic scene that is my living room on multi-screen event nights like this. My daughter, forever bemused by her Dad’s geekiness, posted to Facebook an iPhone snap of me in full multitasking mode. “MacBook, iPad, iPad 2, kindle and iPhone. Everything is a project,” she wrote.

As for the use of mobile at this year’s Super Bowl, the on-air recognition of massive second-screening going on in living rooms around the world seemed truly disappointing. The twitter call-outs were the most consistently satisfying extensions of the ads across displays. And if Mary Meeker’s estimate of 55%+ Twitter use going on over mobile devices is true, then much of this was happening on devices.

Audi was smart enough to make its #SoLongVampires the punchline to a very attractive ad, so I would give props to them for a smart integration. H&M’s #Beckhamforhm provided the best entertainment for my mobile dollar. The user-generated double entendres leveraged the cleverness of the (horny) crowd who just lapped up the opportunity to riff on the soccer star’s abs and package. Ladies, I salute you.

The Madonna-bashing I detected on some streams was a puzzlement to me. Speaking as a longtime antagonist to her modest talents and criminal acting ability, I found the halftime show a rare bit of Super Bowl fun and a smart send-up of Super Bowl excess. The complementary second-screen experiences from Yahoo’s IntoNow and Shazam were also strong, with call outs to advertisers and songs. I got a free downloadable track out of it as well. It was one of the few cases where there was a tangible mobile payoff from the Super Bowl.  

Under-appreciated by much of the commentary I saw was the rich second-screen content from Coca-Cola’s polar bears. The CokePolarBowl.com offered Puppy Bowl-style cuteness running in parallel to the game. With the animated bears reacting to game events, including penguins doing the Vogue, Coke gave the millions of us who were unconcerned with the game a decent distraction. Unfortunately, the site had trouble keeping up with traffic, as far as I could tell. And the resulting online conversation among visitors had none of the Beckham-love creativity to it. More could have been done to seed the user exchanges with more creative prompts.

Finally, Samsung sent the Apple fan boys into a near meltdown with their launch of the Galaxy Note in a 90-second send-up of Apple worship. Riffing again on the waiting line motif, Samsung liberates the iPhone zombies with an extravagant "Glee"-style musical dance number. Some regarded it as a deft takedown, but more than a few of us couldn’t miss how the upcoming device was introduced to the waiting line. “It’s got a pen? This is awesome.”

Samsung is going to take on Apple…with a stylus? Where did I put my old Palm?