• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 10, 2012

It’s the kind of stuff average TV viewers – or even TV industry trade reporters – don’t get to see, but it can make all the difference in the impact of an important advertising campaign. In this case, it was Chrysler’s “Halftime In America” spot featuring Clint Eastwood, which ran during this year’s Super Bowl half-time.

“It was half-time in America, and it had to live inside the half-time of the Super Bowl,” Susan Thomson, Head of Media, Social Media and CRM, Chrysler Group LLC, said during a keynote conversation at MEDIA magazine’s Outfront conference in New York this morning.

That raised some interesting media planning issues, Thomson said, because the ratings of the half-time aren’t typically as high as during the game itself.

“We even had discussions over when are people would be getting off their couches and going to the rest room, and when will they would be eating nachos,” Thomson said, adding that her team did a “second-by-second” audience flow analysis of the Super Bowl half-time break to determine when the most opportune moment might be.

“Our ideal positioning was toward the end of half time right before [second half] kick-off,” she recalled. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The spot, by many accounts, was among viewers’ favorites, and Thomson noted that replays of it on YouTube had generated more than 17 million hits, before Chrysler’s media team “stopped counting.”