While most people watch the Super Bowl for the football, I watch it for the commercials. Last year, the commercials were fairly disappointing, nothing really stuck out or caught my eye. This year, the commercials were better and had a lot more stories to tell. Doritos® came through as the funniest commercials of the game, Google aired their first commercial ever on TV, and I only noticed one repeat commercial. Not bad for three and a half hours of football!
Most people pay attention through the main portion of the commercial and move on by the time the commercial is ending and showing their contact information. While I didn’t watch the end of every commercial that was on, I noticed something different in a lot of commercials… their Social Media information. For companies to list just their website, I’m sure they draw traffic in after the game, but how about listing their Twitter name. It is no secret that Twitter was buzzing during the game with comments about the players, the plays, and even the commercials. Using a mobile version of Twitter it’s not hard to do a search for the name and click follow. Simple as that, a company could gain hundreds of new fans.
Social media icons are slowly popping up around websites where people can find a businesses full list of contact information. Yet it has been lacking on TV. Nine times out of ten I won’t visit a website that is mentioned on TV, but I’ve found that I follow a lot of businesses on Twitter simply because I know they post daily updates and it’s all in one place. With the mention of them on TV I can pick up my phone and add them to my account and receive updates immediately.
With the more frequent updates on their social media account, viewers are more likely to turn around and follow them on social media than visit their website everyday. In turn this will continue to force their brand name in the viewers eyes whether they realize it or not. It’s a smart move for all businesses who are running any form of ad on TV or even on YouTube. The more traffic the better; the more people see a brand the more likely they are to buy it. Ignoring the fact that some businesses will pay millions of dollars for a 30 second to 1 minute ad during the super bowl, it’s worth the extra time to turn around and add one extra bit of contact information in. Adding that one extra bit of text with their Twitter username could turn a whole lot more profit than it took to edit the commercial and add the text.
If businesses are planning to create new commercials in the future I think it is a wise decision to add their Social Media information in there by default. They don’t need to list everything down to their MySpace page, but something as simple as @BusinessTwitterAccount could turn their business traffic around in ways they could only imagine.