Super Bowl. It’s that special time of year where long lost friends and family members are drawn together to eat wings and pizza, while jumping out of their chairs cheering for each touchdown their team makes and giggling over this year’s outrageous commercials.
It’s also the time for companies to participate in the Super Bowl’s competitive advertising environment; pushing the boundaries for the viewers and making a long-lasting (serious or funny) impression. Millions of viewers tune in to the Super Bowl. A suprising 51% for the commercials alone.
Audi Green Police
Lately, a new trend has been emerging. With the rising popularity of viral videos and social media, many companies are taking the stage on YouTube and Facebook prior to Super Bowl, to build up anticipation for the long-awaited advertisements. Audi, for example, has launched a social media campaign by the name of “Green Police.” Protecting and conserving, they have been launching YouTube short videos, using examples such as simple arithmetic to demonstrate how we can keep the landfills free of excess napkins, ending with a catchy theme song reminiscent of Captain Planet.
The Green Police campaign is a catchy and gentle way to highlight the importance of adopting a green lifestyle in order to take care of our environment. The model in the commercial, the Audi A3 TDI, reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 30% and was presented the 2010 “Green Car of the Year” award by Green Car Journal. They are not only helping to educate the public but are following their own advice as well.
Audi has also made use of the social media phenomenon known as Facebook. If you were a fan of the Audi fan page as of Thursday evening, you had access to an early sneak peek of their Super Bowl XLIV commercial, along with bonus extras such as a downloadable “Green Police Remix” made exclusively by the rock band Cheap Trick. They’ve certainly done a good job of adding multiple viral elements to this campaign to make it a hit. One video alone from the Green Police campaign was the “9th most viewed video” on YouTube from Canada today.
E-trade, who is best known for their humorous talking baby commercials, has a 360-degree campaign running, utilizing Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages and YouTube. E-trade alone has 18,000+ Facebook fans and the Fan Page for the baby has 12,000+. Over 3,000 users follow the baby’s tweets on Twitter and 10,000+ subscribers on YouTube, where they’re putting up fresh commercials along with funny outtake s you won’t see during the Super Bowl.
My personal favorite? Outtake number 2.
America loves getting a sneak peak of things to come, so getting an inside look at the new babies that will be airing during the Super Bowl is certain to draw more viewers to the actual event. Some have been speculating that E-Trade’s baby campaign is overrated, but thanks to the solid numbers of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, we can see that the speculation is far from true. Not to mention the amount of fans that are posting their own versions of the E-trade commercials with their own babies. That shows the true amount of love viewers have for them.
Gone are the days where simply having a new (and hopefully humorous) advertisement on deck for an event as large as the Super Bowl will suffice for a company. Viewers and consumers of the product want it all; they want to live, eat and breathe your campaign. Spinning off into social media to turn a company’s commercials into live personalities and making them accessible will keep consumers engaged. If done right, we’ll be amused and constantly looking for new content and sharing it with the people closest to us. Sometimes even strangers via Twitter. This is why viral marketing and social media are such strong additions to any campaign. Companies that are adapting and changing by harnessing this new age marketing to build anticipation for their advertisement on the Super Bowl will attract an extraordinary amount of viewers, including those who may not enjoy watching those guys in funny tight pants throw around a football!
If you’re interested in more of the aforementioned videos, please visit the Green Police YouTube Channel and the E-trade YouTube Channel.
I love that Green Police video! It is a perfect example of taking a free social media outlet and creating something simplistic that really works. These days a funny video can do wonders for most campaigns!