Super Bowl is The Most Expensive 30 Seconds on TV but Youtube becomes more important for advertisers

Super Bowl ads on TV have immense reach and cost big money. Last year’s Super Bowl XLVI attracted 111.3 million viewers, making it the most watched U.S. telecast of all time. This level of exposure doesn’t come cheap, however, as advertisers spent an average of $3.4 million for a 30-second spot, up more than $300,000 from 2011, according to Nielsen. Ads that aired during last year’s Super Bowl were also 34 percent more memorable and 42 percent better-liked than commercials that aired just a month earlier (January 2012).

Top Categories: Manufacturers Come Out Swinging
Many of this year’s big ad spenders were well-known names from familiar categories. Automotive, beer, motion pictures and soft drinks held their positions among the top-five categories, while the uptick in manufacturing spend for Super Bowl XLVI nudged out tortilla chips.

Auto made an aggressive comeback in 2011 and continued to blaze a trail as an ad spending leader during Super Bowl XLVI. After spending more than twice than the motion picture category in 2011, the auto category outspent beer by nearly three-fold in 2012—landing the top spot, by spending $90.5 million. Beer, led by Budweiser and Bud Light, came in a distant second place by spending $31.5 million. With big spenders–like Dodge (Ram), Acura, Audi, Chevy, Fiat–and several others that made the list of top 20 advertisers last year, auto shows no signs of slowing down.

Here is a sneak peak to some of the Superbowl 2013 commercials;

One way of attracting a buzz to your commerical is having it rejected by CBS according to the agency they had to rework the commercial to be approved during the superbowl. Or was this just a another marketing stunt.

Automotive is always a big player at the superbowl this is Kate Upton Washes the All-New Mercedes-Benz CLA in Slow Motion…

Kia’s effort with supernatural babies;

This ad is likely to be talked about a lot.  The message is clear, and it’s a darn good commercial from Audi, entitled “Prom.”  There are different versions you can vote on, and this one is called “Worth It.”

They didn’t stop there.  There are three alternate endings.  This one is called “Tradition:”

And another one called “Buddies:”

Coke has also decided to go to the people to figure out how their Super Bowl ad ends, with an ad taking on a It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, or Rat Race, kind of feel:

Volkswagen looks to be going in a bit of a different direction this year, rounding up a bunch of YouTube sensations into one ad.  They could have easily included “Star Wars Kid” in this thing, but I guess they wanted to try something new:

Behind the scenes is always a good idea to attract engagement and that is just what Century21 tried with these commercial.

This year’s Century 21 Super Bowl ad will continue the “Smarter, Bolder, Faster” theme developed in conjunction with the franchisor’s 40-year anniversary in 2011. In this year’s spots, Century 21 agents will be the celebrities. The ads will have a fun, ironic feel and carry the theme “There’s a Century 21 agent in the house.”

Century 21 is sponsoring an hour long pre-game show. And have their ad in the early part of the 3rd quarter of Super Bowl XLVII.

An interview with Greg Popp – Director of the 2013 Century 21 Super Bowl commercial.

 

Adobe Testing Cross-Device Personalized Video Ads

Aacross TV, online, tablet and smartphone—even when created by the same advertiser. A brand like Coke may have one main TV spot that it shows to broad audiences like those watching the Olympics on their big-screen, but why show that same spot to the individuals checking out the competition on their smartphones if the brand doesn’t have to? What if it can show them a better ad?

That’s at least the premise of Adobe’s video content-and-advertising platform Project Primetime, which handled the live-streaming for this year’s Summer Games.

Adobe unveiled Project Primetime—the fruit of last year’sAuditude acquisition—back in February but has staggered its rollout throughout the year. The latest additions may be its most important yet. Now, via a product called Adobe MediaWeaver, publishers, media companies and app developers flow ads into live, linear and on-demand videos, and the new Primetime Media Player ties together everything together into a single content distribution mechanism.

That should make things more efficient for advertisers and media companies. But the bigger potential may lie in Adobe’s ability to bundle together Project Primetime with its SiteCatalyst and AudienceManager products—enabling brands to see how consumers are responding to videos and video ads. Taken all together, Project Primetime means Adobe can bring display like ad targeting and segmenting to video, across different platforms.

For example, Coke might develop separate spots appealing to moms, kids and young adults. Rather than guess at which devices those audiences might be watching a show on and contextually target them, Coke could make sure that a mom watching the Olympics on her tablet would see an ad that’s different from the one shown to a teenager watching on her iPod Touch and also different from the one shown to a twentysomething watching on Xbox.

During a preview dinner with journalists Tuesday night, Adobe executives made clear that Project Primetime is still in beta, so it’s early to prognosticate on its potential. But one possibility Adobe execs acknowledged was the ability to bid on these video audiences in real-time, as is increasingly the case in online display advertising.

By running its own ad insertion tool with MediaWeaver as well as its own video player, Adobe could put one 30-second spot up for auction and let advertisers compete for which device and audience they would want to reach. In the aforementioned Coke example, Procter & Gamble might outbid the soda company for moms, and Disney might win the teenager, but Coke could grab the twentysomething—or all three consumer segments when found watching on their computers.

Programmatic Buying Key to Integrated TV and Online Video Ad Campaigns according to Adapt TV Report

Adap.tv put out their latest State of the Video Industry 2012 survey for Q4 Just last year, when it was TV vs. Online Video for all the ad dollars? Well, that’s not the case any longer and now it’s all about integrating the two into a cohesive and successful campaign.

Q4 2012 State of the Video Ad Industry: Methodology:

A survey of 700 digital marketing and media professionals was conducted in October 2012 on current attitudes and practices regarding digital video advertising. Participants were contacted via email, and asked to take an online survey. Participants were first asked to identify their companies as brands, agencies, trading desks, publishers, ad networks or DSPs. They then answered a survey of roughly 20 questions regarding their perceptions and practices relating to the buying and selling of digital video advertising. Some of these cohorts were later combined in some cases in the subsequent analysis when they were asked the same question and we didn’t find revealing differences in their answers. In other cases, results were cross-tabbed, to identify differences in each constituents’ viewpoints and practices, as a way of identifying industry disconnects that could hold back the emerging digital video advertising market, or reveal opportunities to improve everyone’s overall satisfaction and ROI.

TV and Online Video Complement Each Other

Whoa! Stop the presses! TV and online video ad campaigns are now being aligned with each other? That seems to be the case as the majority of respondents said that online video should be more aligned with TV than with display advertising. It seems that the industry is catching on to that whole “it’s actually video” thing. In fact, this year the largest budget hit to make room for online video advertising, was display which saw a 37% reduction in spending moved to video. Second on the hit list to pay for video? Print, followed by broadcast TV which saw a 27% reduction.

97% of respondents said that online video ad budgets increased and it averaged out to a 27% bump for it. They’re predicting that it could see another 20% increase for next year as well. Good news for content creators who are looking to monetize by showing ads against their library. Cable did hold out fairly well this year though with just a 13% drop and the old reliables of search and direct response maintained most of their budgets instead of handing it over to video.

So broadcast took a hit, cable didn’t really, but the major thing I think to take away, is the fact that 58% believe that they are going to be planning TV and online video ad campaigns together, a 10% rise from Q1. There’s definitely been a change in the winds it seems. In fact, 67% believe online video to be a direct complement to TV. It’s also predicted that 80% of all ad buyers will be planning TV and online video together.

Facebook a quiet Second-Screen revolution in the Social TV Space

While TV programmers and third parties are scrambling around to craft second-screen experiences that capture TV viewers on smartphones and tablets, the viewers themselves may already have found their favorite second screens on existing social networks. “Users are ahead of service providers in this respect,” says Informa Principal Analyst Nick Thomas in a recent report on the future of TV worldwide. “Many [are] already using Facebook and Twitter and other tools to communicate via the handheld devices about the content they are simultaneously viewing on the TV,” he writes.

Facebook potentially has an enormous role in the evolution of social TV on a number of levels, Thomas argues. The social network can help broadcasters retain audiences with added value for live content experiences even as over-the-top video and time-shifting behaviors erode old viewing activities. At the same time, TV on-demand entities like Netflix could use Facebook to cultivate communities around on-demand content. But Facebook could itself become a social TV platform, with video and social interactions running in parallel.

In an Informa survey of TV, telecom and Internet executives, social networks were considered by 21.8% of respondents to be the types of companies that can persuade users to pay for digital content. Only 16.8% cited network operators like telcos as likely platforms for paid content, while 27.7% pointed to over-the-top services like Netflix and the largest share cited device manufacturers like Apple, Sony and Samsung.

The big content winners are likely to be entertainment, cited by almost 40% of executives as representing the greatest opportunity for increasing viewer engagement. Sports and news and weather were seen as the biggest opportunity by 27.5% and 14.8% of respondents, respectively. But movies (9%) generally were not regarded as a strong content type around which to generate social engagement.

Tablets emerged as the most important second screen among the executives surveyed, with 41.4% saying that tablets would be the dominant tool viewers would employ to access social TV features. 35% cited smartphones as most important; 15.3% said PCs and laptops. Significantly, only 8.6% of the executives surveyed felt that social TV interaction would occur on the TV screen itself. The results suggest just how far the industry has been moved by mobile and portable devices away from pre-existing “Interactive TV” models.

Informa recommends that all of the stakeholders in future TV not rely solely on their own social networks and apps to develop social TV strategies. “[They] need to create a portfolio of external partners, including Facebook, to ensure their social offering is relevant to viewers’ needs. “

Informa also recommends that programmers build viable social TV ad models that work off of the main TV display. The second screen is where advertisers can more precisely target and segment the TV audience. It is “vital to future TV revenues, as old advertising models based on a mass audience become increasingly devalued,” Thomas writes.