• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 2, 2009

Just like on the field, Super Bowl XLIII had its winners and losers among brand marketers trying to turn their big game spots into lasting online results.

This year, E-Trade, Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, and Cash4Gold.com were all integrated marketing winners, according to new data from IPG's search and social media marketing agency Reprise Media.

Reprise's Search Marketing Scorecard ranked Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their TV spots and online presence.

E-Trade, for instance, used "outtakes" of its Super Bowl ads in the weeks leading up to the game to drive interest, which paid off on game night with social media, paid search, and their TV ads all using the same unified message.

Cash4Gold, meanwhile, used searches on the names of its celebrity spokespeople--Ed McMahon and MC Hammer--to drive traffic from paid search to a corporate Blogspot blog with YouTube videos embedded.

The point was to determine how prepared brands are to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl investment, according to Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise. "We still see far too many throwing away millions of dollars by failing to connect their TV campaign with an integrated search and social media presence," said Hershberg.

The big losers on game night included Denny's, Budweiser, and Pixar's film "Up."

Denny's free breakfast promo failed to include a URL in their TV ad or an online call to action. Their Web site, however, still managed to crash soon after their ad aired, and was then down for the rest of the game.

Budweiser, too, ignored any search or social media tie-in with their TV spots. And while the spot for Pixar's Up included a call to action and a URL with previews, the site itself was not integrated at all with the Super Bowl ad, and there were no paid search ads to help direct searchers to the "right" page.

Even brand campaigns that are property integrated online can still fail miserably, according to Robert Passikoff, president of consulting firm Brand Keys.

"Without engagement, brands are just putting their message out there to languish, but engagement involves a lot more than a link on a TV commercial," said Passikoff. "You need to have a solid strategy in place from the beginning, with goals other than just collecting names and building databases."

Gartner Research Vice President Andrew Frank agreed. He noted in a Monday blog post that marketers such as Pepsi and E-Trade failed to snap up search terms like "PepSuber" and "Shankapotamus" tied to their $100,000-a-second Super Bowl spots.

With companies spending millions on the ads, it behooves them to cough up a little more to drive online traffic stemming from the spots. Frank credits GE for buying the term "scarecrow" on Google in connection with its Super Bowl ad promoting its "smart grid" technology that featured a scarecrow. IBM cleverly also bought "scarecrow" on Google to advertise its competing grid technology.

Who's to blame for the lack of online tie-in to Super Bowl ads? "Our most recent survey of marketers and agencies suggests that it's the ad agencies, rather than their clients, that are lagging behind in cross-platform execution," wrote Frank.--with Mark Walsh