• by Shankar Gupta , February 6, 2007

This year, for the first time, most marketers who bought air time during Sunday's Super Bowl also purchased paid search. That's one of the major findings of search engine marketing firm Reprise Media, which conducts a yearly study of Super Bowl ads.

A total of 58% of Super Bowl advertisers--some of whom paid as much as $2.6 million for a 30-second spot--also purchased pay-per-click search ads on their brand names, up from 42% last year, according to Reprise.

"Advertisers are realizing that the ad channels shouldn't necessarily be segregated," said Josh Stylman, managing partner at Reprise Media.

Marketers doing the best job of integrating a search campaign with their Super Bowl ads, Reprise reported, were: candy brand Snickers, Internet domain registrar GoDaddy.com, movie rental chain Blockbuster, job site Careerbuilder.com, drugmaker King Pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical Flomax, and fast food chain Pizza Hut.

The advertisers who did the poorest job, according to Reprise, included: car manufacturer Ford, snack food brand Doritos, wireless company T-Mobile, consumer electronics company Toshiba, clothing manufacuturer IZOD, beverage company Snapple, financial services company PNC Bank and insurance giant Prudential.

Stylman added that he expected car manufacturers to make more of an effort to leverage search marketing. "We were really surprised that the automakers still did very, very poorly. They definitely completely, completely missed out on the cross-channel visibility."

Rival search engine marketing company SendTec also issued a report Monday examining Super Bowl marketers' use of paid search. SendTec named GPS technology firm Garmin, GoDaddy.com and Snickers as the best at online-offline integration.

SendTec found that car companies, online trading company eTrade and the American Heart Association did the worst at supporting their TV ads with search campaigns.

Separately, Blockbuster's ad and Anheuser-Busch spots were big hits with consumers online at iFilm and AOL, which offered on-demand streams of the Super Bowl. At iFilm, the most-watched ad was Blockbuster's, while Budweiser's "Rock Paper Scissors" spot came in second. AOL, which polled visitors about their favorite ads, reported that 13% chose the Blockbuster spot, while 8% chose Budweiser's "Dalmatian," 7.6% voted for Bud Light's "Gorillas," 6.8% chose Bud Light's "Hitchhiker," and 4.7% voted for Bud Light's "Crabs."

Fox Sports on MSN, which also offered streams of the ads, reported that Bud Light's "Rock, Paper Scissors" ad proved most popular, based on a user poll.