While automakers getting ready for the Super Bowl by creating new TV ads, Venables Bell & Partners, an independent San Francisco ad agency conducts a study regarding the game and Americans’ digital consumption habits. VB&P is Audi of America’s agency of record and creator of five years’ worth of Super Bowl spots.
Photo: the Super Bowl inphographics, clickable
According to the study, Facebook will be a Super Bowl marketer’s network No. 1 as it is set to edge out YouTube for ad searching and sharing.
“Facebook has been critical to game day and post game marketing for a couple of years now, but for the first time in our study we are seeing the site bypass YouTube and brand sites as the first place Americans search online for ads pre-game,” said Lucy Farey-Jones, partner and head of strategy, VB&P.
Almost one in five (19%) Americans searched for ads before the game in 2011, about double (11%) who did in 2010. Of that group, 48% searched for ads on Facebook, putting the site just ahead of popular video sharing site YouTube, brand sites, and media sources as the lead destination to find ads.
Americans will also share ads on Facebook. Study has unveiled that more than a third (36%) of Americans plan to share their favorite ad via social media. Of that group, 87% will share via Facebook, which is more than emailing with a YouTube link (6%) and Twitter (4%). In theory, this means that if 111 million people watched this year’s game, there could be 35 million posts on Facebook about Super Bowl advertising and with the average Facebook user having 130 friends those collective posts could result in over 4.5 billion impressions.
Digital engagement during the Super Bowl has increased doubly from 2010—2012. More than half of Americans (52%) plan to be engaged with some type of communications tools while watching the game, a percentage that drastically increases for young adults (85%). 30% of Americans will be texting and roughly a quarter will be on Facebook, followed by e-mail, telephone, search, Twitter, IM and blogging.
It is curious that Americans are almost as likely to ‘like’ a brand on Facebook that advertises during the Super Bowl (20%) as they are to ‘like’ a team (29%), with 23% of young adults likely to ‘like’ a brand.
