A Direct Marketing Agency - Helping Brands Acquire and Retain Customers

A week after a game that was highly contested on the field and one of the biggest mass-marketing events in history, many pundits have weighed in on the advertising that sponsored it, and the consensus is that there were no big winners among the advertisers.

While advertisers paid a new high of $2.7 million for a :30 spot most seemed to forget lessons that were learned years ago, mainly the lesson of integration. In contrast to the late '90s when every ad ended with a dotcom, the web was almost non-existent in this year’s ads. If it was there at all, it seemed to be an afterthought.

For those millions of viewers who sat in their living rooms with their attention divided between the TV and their computers, how cool would it have been to view a commercial and be able to immediately go online to the brand’s site and interact with something relevant to what they’d just seen? Anyone who tried that last Sunday was most likely disappointed.

Michael Estrin of iMedia Conneection explored these phenomena, noting that many brands apparently chose an integration strategy that simply left users on their own in the digital space. The idea that integration wasn't critical seems to have been the big theme for this year's ads as most brands returned to traditional spots. With the continued growth in the digital space, it's hard to see why the year's No. 1 advertising event would opt for a traditional approach. http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/18241.asp

It's apparent that no one has yet discovered how to best integrate between platforms, but we can only hope that Super Bowl XLIII will take us forward on that path.