At the climax of last night’s Superbowl, Eli Manning threw a 13-yard touchdown pass to win the game with 35 seconds to spare. The New York Giant’s 17-14 win over the New England Patriots is now being touted as the best ever. But advertisers are yet to decide on whether their investment in the US’ television industry’s single biggest sporting event of the year have been worth their while.

140 million Americans tune into the game at some point, and with the style of play meaning that ad breaks run every 3-4 minutes, Superbowl sunday has, for a long time, been the pinnacle of advertising creativity and budget. With brands spending $90,000 per second for a slot during the game, you only get one shot at making an impression. Superbowl has produced some of advertising’s most famous slots, Apple’s “1984” is often cited as having a lasting impact on the ad-world.

However, for this year’s game, feedback was a little more immediate. Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang issued a call to the marketing industry to use Twitter to vote for their favourite or least favourite ads during the game. By replying to @superbowlads, users could register their feedback and view other people’s thoughts on a search results page. So, in addition to game reaction from the likes of Todd Defren and Amanda Gravel in the Pats corner, and Jason Calcanis backing the Giants, Twitter was deluged with comments on the multi-million dollar commercials breaking up the action. As the game was screened on the BBC over here, I’ve yet to give my “two cents” on the spots themselves, but I’ll be browsing the a selection that’s being hosted on a purpose built Myspace page.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 2:54 pm by Nina and is filed under Broadcast, General, New Media, PR and Marcomms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.