The Super Bowl is one of the biggest cultural (and spiritual) events of the year, and soon 115 million Americans will tune in to watch the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos face off for the football world championship. Or, at least, most of them will. Others will be watching for the commercials, which have grown to rival the game itself in popularity.
At a time when social media marketing is more popular than ever — and with digital marketing set to surpass TV advertising in the next two years — some Super Bowl advertisers are looking to take their commercials to social media channels.
This year, Snapchat decided to start selling ad space in its “Live Story,” set to occur during the big game. Pepsi, Amazon, Marriott, and big beer companies have already reportedly bought ads worth seven-figure sums.
Snapchat’s advertising platform is still relatively new and untested, but with mobile users accounting for 52% of all pay per click (PPC) engagement, Snapchat is trying to lure in more advertisers to its popular mobile app.
It’s a natural evolution in the advertising world. For the past several years, advertisers have followed up their broadcast advertising with targeted social media marketing campaigns. And on Super Bowl Sunday, companies measure the effectiveness of their ads by how much engagement they find on popular social media sites like Twitter.
Those big-budget Super Bowl commercials aren’t going anywhere, but you can expect more and more of them to include hashtags and call-to-actions that push consumers to a Twitter or Instagram account. Still, while Snapchat expects to capitalize off the biggest event of the year, search marketing and PPC ads are still the fastest growing form of digital marketing.
Last year the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that search ads made up 39% ($9.1 billion) of the total online advertising revenue in the first half of 2014. When they included mobile search revenue, the total jumped to $11.8 billion in revenue. So far, all signs indicate those revenues have grown sharply in 2015 as well. But with social media sites and blogs accounting for 23% of all the time we spend online, companies can’t afford to ignore social media either.
So if you’re the type of person who looks forward to the Super Bowl commercials, don’t forget to check Snapchat during the game.
