• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, January 16, 2014

Unruly Media, pointing toward the Super Bowl on Feb. 2, reiterated in a more official way today what has become apparent the last few years: 60% of the most shared Super Bowl commercials actually debuted before the big game itself. In a related stat, seven out of the top 20 most shared Super Bowl commercials last year were teased ahead of time.

In short, it appears that except for Janet Jackson’s breast, Super Bowl surprise reveals just aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.

New details emerge daily. I can hardly sleep anticipating the Chobani ad, the first time that the Greek yogurt brand has stepped on that most uncultured media stage. I guess everybody’s talking about it.

Unruly likes to make the point that last year’s Super Bowl ads earned twice as many shares online as ads did the year before. I would suppose the same kind of incremental increase this year (and for online video, doubling sometimes seems be just..incremental), mainly because the idea of going online to see and share commercials has become baked into the system. Online viewing and sharing, once a little unusual, is now ubiquitous.

That, in fact, makes me wonder if the absurd crap shoot of appearing in the Super Bowl is really worth the extreme expense. (It does not make Unruly feel that way, I should stress.)

It once was that almost all over-produced and far-too-clever commercials were produced for that game, but as YouTube and online video has gained enormous popularity, that's no longer true. They pop up there all the time, all year long. It seems an advertiser could save $4 million by just debuting a new and novel commercial on some other platform—one of the big games leading up to the big game, for example, or some media-centric program like “The Daily Show”—and do just as well, relying on the viral highway to take it from there. Still, Fox sold out its game inventory about two months ago.

One of the problems with Super Bowl ads is that great ones stand out but really, really good ones are pushed to the back shelves of viewer and media commenters’ minds. And horrible ones get picked apart mercilessly.

That reminds me. Woody Hayes, the late madman/head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes, once correctly observed: “Three things can happen when you pass the ball, and two of them are bad." I’d say that by now, that’s also true with trying to create a shareworthy or just newsworthy Super Bowl ad. Most of the time, no one will “receive” it. Or, in the second instance, something much worse will happen, like a really bad, offensive ad that makes everyone who sees it hate you. It’s an offensive penalty, an interception of your expensive marketing plan.

Unruly seems to recognize this, but isn’t emphatic about it. In a “playbook” it’s put together, it notes that the 20 top ads from Super Bowl 2013 accounted for 93% of all the shares, leaving about 70 ads to feast over the remaining 7% of the shares. This, again, suggests to me that based on shares—and that’s a pretty good way to judge Super Bowl ads because it’s the current tribal way to spread a message—the odds are stacked against you. Indeed, Unruly has long argued that even a funny ad isn’t good enough. It’s got to be pee-in-your-pants funny, or don’t bother.

Well, probably your creative isn’t doing that.     

Believe me, or believe Unruly: Most advertisers will know the full value (or waste) of their money by Wednesday, three days after the game. Unruly says the most ad shares for Super Bowl 2013—3.3 million—were recorded the day after the game. By Tuesday, the shares went down by a little more half from that number to 1.6. It’s all dribs and drabs from there. As Unruly has shown, that’s true with most ads, not just Super Bowl advertising. Messages get shared when they’re new. And “new” is an ever-narrowing window for a perpetually-on population. Trending doesn’t mean enduring.

“The Super Bowl is no longer just about creating a compelling :30 TV spot that will be the talked about at the office on Monday morning,” Unruly US President Richard Kosinski says in a canned statement. “With more than 500,000 shares of branded video every 24 hours, the Super Bowl offers advertisers a unique opportunity to efficiently extend the reach of their Super Bowl investment and generate excitement leading up to Super Bowl Sunday and beyond.”

He doesn’t add, “Or not.” But Unruly is in the business of making advertising oh-so-shareable. It is still aware the Super Bowl is quite the big deal. 

Unruly’s playbook for advertisers is loaded with hints and daunting data about how to make an effective Super Bowl ad. One thing that’s not in there is “Don’t go looking for answers with less than three weeks before the game.” So I would suppose this playbook is more onlookers, and it’s worth it because these Unruly people seem to have gotten this sharing thing down.

What I’m no longer very convinced about is whether the Super Bowl will long be the Super Bowl for ad sharing. The weekly Unruly Video Viral Chart seems to suggest the Super Bowl is an expensive ticket to accomplish something an advertiser could do in some other context, for far less. I think it's become a year-round sport.

pj@mediapost