Would any commentary on a modern day sporting spectacle be complete without a word on digital and social media? Here is a collection of thoughts and observations from Super Bowl 46.
NFL's Social Media Command Centre
The NFL is taking the information super-highway seriously. In a perfect world, "Playing Social" should have more to do with listening than it does with actually saying anything.
To this end, Super Bowl 46 saw the event's first "Social Media Command Centre" - a fully staffed listening room in downtown Indianapolis which not only listened to what was being said on digital online networks but who was saying it and where they were saying it from.
The technology helped keep a finger on the pulse of how the event was progressing, providing sentiment measures from the massive audience and enabling a team of 50 volunteers to respond in real time to anything which might contribute to negative PR. The team also helped provide practical information on such important issues as parking, traffic congestion in addition to being fully briefed on disaster control procedures.
Incidentally, this is not the first time we've seen command centres of this sort. Gatorade's "Mission Control", established in 2010, is a great prototypical example.
Spark: How could your brand use such a tactic to facilitate fans experience of a major event?
The first Legal Live-Streaming of the Super Bowl
Over 2.1m fans were able to watch the game on something other than a conventional television set. While this is insignificant relative to the total television audience of 113m people, it set an online record for viewership of online sporting streams. Naturally, fans watching in this way were not exposed to even half the entertainment that conventional viewers saw. For example, ads could only be watched after they'd aired on the "big" screen (and then only via "opt-in") and Madonna's half time show was completely absent. Note, the live-stream was only available in North America because NBC's broadcast rights do not extend much further than that.
Spark: A few months ago we looked at how Budweiser was sponsorsing the Youtube viewing of first round FA cup games. Is there space for a big brand like Castle to facilitate something like this?
The rise and rise of the "second screen"
I've written much in the past about how the modern fan's game experience is greatly enhanced by the simultaneous use of a digital device while watching. This might involve accessing a Twitter stream on a mobile phone or even joining a Social TV channel like Shazam on a tablet device or laptop computer. So important is this trend that it has finally been given it's own name ("second screen") and a formal definition which, since it strikes me as being too complicated, I have re-stated as follows:
Second Screen can refer to any any class of technology which a fan access to interact with richer or more interacive content than the stuff s/he is watching on a conventional TV broadcast.
I have already remarked in an earlier post how Pepsi made good tactical use of Social TV to drive the entertainment factor for viewers.
Runaway growth in social commentary compared to Super Bowl 45
This insert from Bluefin really says it all
Related link here
The watching and re-watching of ads - thanks to digital
I remarked in Part 1 that the notion of only flighting an ad during the match itself is more or less absurd today given the widespread use of digital platforms to seed ads before-hand. While I believe this dynamic is a crutch to advertisers - and on a long enough timline will rob us of some epic ads - a study by Venables Bell and Partners revealed some staggering stats which show just how much sharing actually goes on.
- 1 in 5 Americans will seek out an ad prior to the big game
- 48 million plan to re-watch an ad online after the game
- 40 million plan to share their favourite ads using digital technology
This handy infographic is a useful eye-dent
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