Super (Bowl) Meta-Marketing

It's Monday, and we all know who won the Super Bowl, but who won the ad war?

The Super Bowl, of course, is not really about football. Unless you're one of the relatively few Colts or Bears fans in Denver, watching the game was probably more about merrily drinking beer on a Sunday afternoon. And, of course, the commercials. I watched the game with a mishmash of football fans - Broncos, Cowboys, Patriots - all half-heartedly throwing their support behind one of the big teams. But their eyes were not exactly glued to the screen. Conversations paused briefly when a roar in the bar indicated a big play was in progress, but the chatting completely ceased during commercial breaks. Some of the ads had generated enough buzz beforehand that we were actually looking for them.

"Shhh. It's the K-Fed ad."

It's marketing magic. What other time do we want to watch commercials? "Please," we say to the huge corporations that can afford the $2.6 million price tag, "Sell me stuff. Entertain me with the antics of your silly frogs and horses!"

But for companies buying ad time, it's not enough to just tell the creative department to come up with something that will make 90 million tipsy people laugh. They can't just market their product in a commercial, they have to market the commercial itself. They have to market their marketing to their target market, get it? Some companies, such as Doritos and Chevrolet, held contests beforehand challenging students and other wannabes to create ads. Advertising Age criticized Super Bowl advertisers who failed to buy preferred search results from Google (Doing so would have ensured that Googlers looking for the Doritos ad online would have found in on Doritos' preferred site).

The game is over, but Super Bowl advertisers aren't resting just yet. The race is on to determine which ads will be quoted for the next year by America's frat boys and which ones were a waste of $2.6 million. As I write this, geeks all over the country are trying to make that call. Researchers at UCLA are actually performing brain scans to see which ads make viewers' brains light up. The verdict: Pizza rocks! Jessica Simpson, not so much. Over at YouTube, visitors can watch all the ads and vote on their rankings in what they've deemed the "SuperVote." The site has conveniently put 51 of 'em in one place so we can watch them again and again and again...Mmmm, Doritos...