The Super Bowl, holds prestige in the marketing world as the barometer of advertising victories and failures. While brands hang their high end budget and hopes on Super Bowl supremacy across all screens, the clear winner in this game is the digital platform which is reaping the benefits of traffic surges and screen engagement.
The advertising component of the Super Bowl has shifted from the main event of linear screen viewing – and the hyper expensive TV screen time advertising unveiling- to the digital channels around it.
This year, Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” was victorious on the social share, video streaming front and garnered the most TV coverage. According to the Unruly Viral Video Chart, the ad generated 1.38 million shares, and post event was the sixth most shared Super Bowl ad of all time- to date.
Brands are now seen the pre and post event benefits of video based advertising campaigns. Thanks to IPTV, the main event is no longer the only game in town.
Video advertising platform LiveRail revealed unprecedented demand for video advertising, predominantly in the 12-hour period after the Super Bowl ends.
The tide tuned digital this year in a way that it has not done so before. Online video ad spending has been reported as being three times the normal amount in the 12 hours after the Super Bowl. According to LiveRail, brands continued to invest heavily in Super Bowl TV commercials, but augmented traditional spend with online channel investment to ensure those ads were exposed to the biggest audience possible. Brands tended to buy pre-roll spots in the day before the game and the two days after with alcoholic beverage and financial services being the heaviest spenders.
The Winter Olympics is also proving to be another online video ad boom time. As more large-scale live events reach bigger global audiences via online streaming , video advertising is creating the monetiziation model that IPTV providers have been waiting for. Yet, handling the demand of large, live-media events like the Super Bowl creates a unique level of complexity of ad infrastructure.
Online publishers need to be close to their infrastructure providers to ensure that they can effectively monetize their live streams and deliver a consistent user-experience. Issues that need to be looked at include, scaling infrastructure, ensuring the high volume of ad requests can be met and looking at different delivery methods like melding ads directly into the online video stream for a better user experience.
