Being the single most important sporting event in the US, the yearly Superbowl can also be used for other purposes than drinking beer and cheering on your favourite team. Advertisers have long since understood that having the whole nation (90 million people tuned in this year) in front of the TV screen simultaneously, is an opportunity not to be missed.

If a brand can afford what must be the most expensive ad time slots in history at $2.7 million for 30 seconds, the Superbowl offers a huge potential to engage with interested consumers during the game. Every year, reprisemedia.com releases the Search Marketing Scorecard (SMS) which measures the success of advertisers in capitalising on the Superbowl TV ads by integrating them with their online presence. Superbowl ads are known to often create lots of buzz, but if advertisers do not connect the TV ads with their web presence and use Search and Social Media to take advantage online of the interest generated by their TV ads, they’re missing out big time.

Advertising with Search and Social Media

According to reprisemedia.com, this year’s SMS winners count Pepsi, Tide, and T-Mobile for connecting TV advertising with Search and Social Media, while the brands at the bottom of the score card were next to invisible online, effectively failing to capitalise on the interest generated by their TV ads. Pepsi not only posted their ads on Social Media site Youtube, is present on Facebook, and runs several websites. They also encouraged their Superbowl TV ad audience to sign up to download mp3’s at pepsistuff.com.

Not all advertisers did as well as Pepsi. Less than 10% of advertisers worked the mascot, celebrity, or tagline into their Search key phrases. Not one single ad pointed to SMO presence (such as MySpace, Youtube, Facebook, etc), and while most included a URL, only 6% included a call to action in their ads, asking users to visit them online. Although 46% had a corporate owned profile in social networks and 44% had a corporate owned presence on video sharing sites, only 14% posted Superbowl related material on social network sites.

While the traffic stats for 2008 have not yet been released, the 2007 stats suggest that the online potential for Superbowl advertisers is huge. Millions of viewers turn to the search engines to find out more about the advertised products and services. More accurately, 19% or 17.6 million people went online for more information about the ads in 2007.

Although this study applies specifically to the Superbowl, it tells us something of the general importance of integrating offline and online marketing. TV ads do not come cheap, so why loose out on the opportunity to convert viewers into active consumers on your website? The Superbowl is only special to advertising because it draws so many viewers at once. That doesn’t mean that these findings do not apply to your everyday TV campaigns. The opportunities are many and by integrating your advertising efforts you can drive traffic to online campaigns effectively turning viewers into users and maybe customers. It also enables advertisers to measure TV ad performance and prove TV ad ROI as well as help identify the ads with the biggest impact. We can learn a lot from the Superbowl ads but the most important message is the importance of integrated marketing efforts:

Make it easy for interested viewers to find you online:

• Make sure your website is on the top of the search engine listings both for key phrases relating to brand, company name, products, and related keywords.
• Include URL in offline campaign.
• Include keywords in offline campaign. The keywords/key phrases/catch phrases make it easy for people to find your website even if they don’t remember the URL – or the product. A keyword driven campaign also makes it easy for you to direct people to a specific Landing Page. If the ad is shown in connection with a specific high profile event, include keywords that relate to that event.
• Publish your ads on Social Media sites online, so interested consumers can see the ad again. This practise also helps create online buzz and incoming links to your website, which in turn can help your websites get higher rankings on the search engines.

Make interested viewers want to find you online:

• Give viewers a reason to want to find you online.
• Target your customers.

Reward those who find you online:

• Lead them to the content they are looking for – target Landing Pages for your offline ads.
• Connect online and offline - make sure the offline commercial is recognisable in the online design/style and content-wise.
• Give visitors an experience that makes them feel like they connect with your brand.

There is no reason not to integrate online and offline marketing but plenty of reasons to take advantage of the opportunities offered by this integration. Many large brands are beginning to realise this while others are still lagging behind. If you still got a ways to go, maybe now is the time to jump on the band wagon and start capitalising on your integrated marketing efforts.