Mobilized Super Bowl: Watching The Second Screen This Sunday

Pepsi-Ad-on-TabletAt best, recent Super Bowls have been a disappointment to mobile marketers. Attempts to leverage the mobile phone as an activation device for those massively financed TV spots have been few and far between. When the stray SMS prompt does pop up on screen, it often flies by too quickly for easy recall.

This year may well be different. The reality of second screening finally has settled in. As Harris Interactive reported this week, almost 60% of Super Bowl viewers will be glancing at or actively using their cell phones during the game this year. Marketers don’t want to miss out this time, and so along with the usual previews, teases and “leaks” of TV spots, the mobile programs are rolling out in advance of the big game.

Chevy has already launched its smartphone and tablet Chevy Game Time app that is designed to run throughout the game and complement the brand’s TV spots with social media and interactivity.

The Shazam app has promised that about a third of Super Bowl ads will be recognized by the audio recognition engine and will serve up complementary content.  Toyota’s spot for the Camry will be among the partnerships with Shazam. The app will recognize the ad playing, either on YouTube or during the Sunday game, to enter its sweepstakes up to once a day.

Yahoo’s IntoNow social TV app has collaborated with Pepsi MAX. When the Pepsi MAX ad runs on TV it will trigger the audio recognition functionality in IntoNow and unlock the user’s entry to the Pepsi MAX for Life sweepstakes. 

Pepsi rival Cocke will have its Arctic Polar Bears interacting with viewers over the #GameDayPolarBears hashtag.

A newcomer to the ad technology segment, SecondScreen Networks will run synchronized ads on a large entertainment Web site and on the PrePlay and TapCast mobile apps when they play on TV. SecondScreen CEO Seth Tapper says that the ad serving technology uses “video fingerprinting” that knows the precise time an ad is running and then will send a display complement to the apps and site. “We signed three national sponsors in two weeks,” he says.

GoDaddy is the only one of the three SecondScreen partners to announce the synchronized ads. Tapper says that ad effectiveness firm Dynamic Logic will be measuring brand effects of the two-screen exposures. “We are doing an extensive research project,” he says. “The idea here is to prove the efficacy of the media and then develop reach around the Oscars and March Madness.”

Subway is sponsoring a play predictor app -- PrePlay, the same app that will serve the GoDaddy complement via SecondScreen. Subway’s more extensive sponsorship bakes the brand into the app’s features.  

And while most on-air spots won’t have explicit mobile components, it is most likely that viewers will use their smartphone browsers to respond to on-air callouts to Web URLs and dedicated social media pages. In those case, ad chasers should get reliable mobile experiences. The usual suspect for these prompts are YouTube and Facebook, where the sites optimize for the mobile browsers.  If, as Harris Interactive’s survey suggests, the clear majority of viewers will have their cell phones at the ready, then mobile will be the second screen of choice.

Longtime critic of mobile marketing (or the lack thereof) during Super Bowls past Jeff Hasen, CMO, Hipcricket says, “we will look back at this as the year of the Super Bowl Mobile. But I don’t know if this will be the way brands will use it going forward.” It will be interesting to see if the various audio recognition apps synchronize accurately amidst the uniquely noisy Super Bowl viewing environment, he says.

And in the end it is important that mobile marketing plays well in this first widespread mobilization of the biggest ad day of the year. “We need the agency and the brand folks to say that we finally did use mobile well and had a great experience,” says Hasen.

Hasen argues that marketers need to give viewers multiple entryways for activating what they see on the first screen, whether it is an audio recognition app or a text prompt. But more to the point, the device needs to be used to get beyond the big branding bang of a Super Bowl TV spot and do what mobile does best, initiate relationships. “I am looking for that remarkable opportunity to build a database,” he says. “It is un-sexy and meat and potatoes, but the opportunity is to build those hundreds of thousands into an opt-in database.”  

Last year, Denny’s generated 2 million diners after offering Super Bowl viewers a free breakfast in a famous game spot in 2009. “I want to see a case study of work that sends people to have their eggs and show how they used mobile to get two or three million of those people in a database,” he says. “Otherwise we are looking at the viewer in the same way we did in Super Bowl I.”

Next story loading loading..