The big game is over, but in the contest for Super Bowl search preparedness, results are just getting in-- iCrossing's director of industry relations explains.
The players have left the field, the water-cooler conversation has moved on, the game is over, right? Wrong. The Super Bowl may be a distant memory, but in the Search Bowl, the action is just heating up.
We've seen a flood of statistics in the past few weeks about the rise in search traffic for Super Bowl advertisers. And while a rise in overall search activity is certainly a healthy indicator of interested consumers, the real question is not whether those consumers are searching more, but whether they're actually connecting with the brands they're looking for. In other words, how prepared were advertisers to get the most out of the high-cost, high-visibility commercials aired during the big game? And leaving aside the creative merits of the ads, to what extent did they optimize their web presence to anticipate the flood of post-Super Bowl search traffic?
Super Bowl ads' visibility
According to our own internal analysis, the answers to the above questions are not very and not much. To test Super Bowl advertisers' level of search preparedness, we created an overall ranking by matching all branded and non-branded keywords relevant to the creative content of their TV spots. We then calculated their positioning against the major search engines and estimated search traffic. The resulting index determined the visibility of a company for a defined set of branded, non-branded and generic Super Bowl commercial keywords (terms such as "Super Bowl ads"). On a scale of one to 10, a score of three or less signified moderate visibility for search, a score of four to five revealed high visibility and a score of six or greater indicated dominance.
By our reckoning, just under 20 percent of Super Bowl advertisers finished with a score of six or better. The winners -- brands such as Sprint, Blockbuster and FedEx -- scored with viewers for a reason: they optimized their websites for brand-specific terms and phrases, keywords and taglines from their Super Bowl commercials and generic Super Bowl commercial terms. They then supplemented this advanced planning with paid placement on the leading search engines, thereby building broad visibility for their brands. By contrast, CareerBuilder, which finished mid-pack in the rankings, squandered opportunities to capitalize on its popular animal-themed TV spots by not securing visibility for obvious terms like "monkey commercial." Instead, competitor Monster.com bought those keywords on Google, siphoning off traffic that could have gone to CareerBuilder, the brand identified with monkey business.
Overall, our calculations indicate that well over 50 percent of Super Bowl advertisers ended up at the back of the pack in this year's Search Bowl rankings, including iconic brands such as Budweiser, Burger King, Pepsi, MasterCard, McDonald's, Motorola, Pizza Hut, Procter & Gamble (Gillette) and Unilever. Anyone shocked by these results should not find fault with the ads themselves, since they clearly amused and piqued the interest of viewers. Rather, they should look closely at the assumption that creative, entertaining TV commercials alone will carry the day.
Tips for boosting search results
By distributing the commercials across a range of channels both during and after the game, Super Bowl marketers showed that they understood the opportunity to connect (and reconnect) with interested consumers. But many advertisers simply dropped the ball when it came to tying their creativity to the web. For example, if Pizza Hut decides to run another commercial featuring Jessica Simpson in a starring role, it should make sure to optimize around terms such as "Jessica Simpson commercial" and complement this effort with a paid media campaign (neither of which Pizza Hut did in this case). The same goes for Burger King with Brooke Burke, and so on. This is the way for brands to maximize the traffic they channel to their websites (and prevent interested consumers from going to their competitors' sites), both during and well after the game.
We know for certain that Super Bowl ads now attract a broad spectrum of viewers with little or no interest in football who might turn their attention elsewhere on game day. For brand marketers, the key to capturing this audience and maximizing returns from Super Bowl commercials is planning ahead. Ad buys begin months in advance of the Super Bowl. This gives advertisers ample opportunity to understand how their target audience thinks about their brands. If we accept the notion that the ways consumers search are a reflection of how and what they think, advertisers have access to plenty of clues they can use to synchronize their creative and search marketing strategies right from the start.
The stakes are higher than ever now that the commercials enjoy a long afterlife on a burgeoning range of media and devices. Granted, the biggest exposure comes during the game, when 90 million or so viewers are tuned in to watch the play (and the ads), but the opportunity to capture the attention of interested consumers can continue for weeks and months to come.
We also know that the creative side of a high-profile commercial can take a while to come together, and often the process is shrouded in a veil of secrecy to maximize the media buzz in advance of game day. But that's no reason for advertisers themselves to remain in the dark. Those planning on spending untold millions on Super Bowl ad placement next year should make selecting a broad set of keywords an integral part of conceiving and producing their TV spots. Adopting this strategy from day one affords advertisers the opportunity to test visibility results for generic as well as brand- and creative-specific keywords and phrases. The results that emerge from these tests can help to define a roadmap for optimization targets and avenues for targeting competitors.
While the creative is coming together, smart advertisers can take simple, yet effective steps to get ahead of the game. One is to build Super Bowl commercial content for past advertisements into their websites and begin to raise their visibility for generic Super Bowl commercial terms. Few advertisers took advantage of this opportunity for Super Bowl XL, but it was one of the factors that separated the Search Bowl winners from the contenders and also-rans.
The message to advertisers is this: don't fumble the ball by letting that expensive creativity go to waste. If there is some sort of media end zone, virtual or otherwise, raising search visibility through offline-to-online, old media-to-new media synergy is a must for advertisers who want to be doing their own dance there, wherever it is.
Noah Elkin, Ph.D., is director of industry relations at iCrossing. He liaises with the analyst community, represents iCrossing at key industry events, contributes to proprietary studies and generates thought leadership as iCrossing expands its search offerings to wireless devices, interactive television and other emerging technology platforms.
Prior to joining iCrossing, Dr. Elkin served for five years as senior analyst at eMarketer, where he covered developments in mobile voice and data, wireless devices, mobile marketing and m-commerce. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University and received a B.A. with honors from Columbia University.