I will say that I do love a good football game. I love watching the game, the commercials, the food and the halftime show. Basically anything and everything during the game, I love. It makes perfect sense that the Super Bowl is one of my favorite "holidays" and for it to be the 50th Super Bowl made it even more special. Unfortunately, I was completely let down. Actually, I was so disappointed that I didn't even make it past the halftime show. In general, everything about it for me was disappointing.
Besides the game just being disappointing overall, I thought that the commercials were extremely dull and boring. One would think that if you are paying millions of dollars for a few seconds of air time then the commercials must be the best you can possibly produce? Well clearly a few companies were not in this frame of mind. I know that football stays, for the most part, in one demographic, but you would think that during the SuperBowl they would think to engage all of the people watching, including the large female population.
I also think that the social media presence was quite lower than what it normally is during football games. I think that while CBS had commercials all throughout the season talking about the game and the hashtag that they would use, not as many people engaged in it as I would have liked to see. The majority of people that were tweeting about the Super Bowl on Twitter were not even using the hashtag. Personally, I did not know that the hashtag existed until midway through the first half. Also, a lot of the activity on social media was complaints about the lack of replays and bad audio. Personally, I thought that it was a major flaw in the coverage of CBS and something that should have been more closely monitored.
Overall, I was really let down by this Super Bowl. The only saving grace for this was obviously Beyonce slaying the halftime show. Other than that, the social media coverage and commercials were a major let down. Here's hoping that Super Bowl 51 will be better.
Suze and I talked about this Monday where we said how the game itself was actually not incredibly entertaining to watch. This led to the hope that the commercials and ads would be, but I agree that in the beginning of the game the ads were not nearly as strong as they were later on in the second half of the game. I wrote about the Heinz and Drake commercials which both were aired in the second half. Granted no one can predict exactly how the game would have happened, but there is so much planning and so much money involved in the Superbowl it would have made sense to spread out the commercials through both halves. Unless they wanted to draw in viewers to stay watching the whole game to get to funnier commercials, that would be the only reason I would think that they would have had the set up they had. I do agree that there could have been more done with the Superbowl and a better way to keep viewers interested for the whole game rather than waiting for a majority of it for the classic funny commercials.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that CBS didn't fully capitalize on the potential social media coverage. They could have used it to their benefit a little more by allowing fans to interact. It seemed like a one sided conversation, which is not good marketing at all.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad I'm not the only one looking like a #SB50 downer. It's really interesting that we were all so let down by the big game this year. I also wrote about how a certain culture has grown around the Super Bowl, and I feel like that's become such a huge part of what unites us all for the "holiday". Even if we're not necessarily a football fan (I'll admit that I STILL don't understand the game itself), we're there for the party, the ads, the snacks, etc. That's enough to get everyone to show up. But the ads really weren't enough to keep me engaged this year. I still watched till the end, perhaps subconsciously waiting for some mindblowing ad to finally make its appearance.
ReplyDeleteI agree with this year's Superbowl being somewhat of a downer, but I still think Coldplay should receive a little more credit for their influence in this year's performance (even with Beyoncé stealing the show). CBS definitely could have taken the opportunity to utilize social media, especially Twitter with the halftime show. Maybe this could have helped Coldplay in their received tweets, but I don't think that will affect their tour this coming summer
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ReplyDeleteDemographics are definitely important to consider in an event as large-scale as the Superbowl. Since football typically only caters to a particular demographic, advertisers need to keep in mind that many of the Superbowl audience is not tuning in just to watch a football game. Ads are forever, not only shown at the Superbowl game, so I think it is important to create an ad that will reach several demographics.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with all of your ideas Suze! I loved how you mentioned more about CBS and the broadcast of the Super Bowl as a lot of people don't think about that part of the event.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that the ads didn’t do a good job at engaging the entire audience of people watching. I felt that a lot of the ads were targeted only to the football watching demographic of men. Especially the budweiser advertisement that basically promoted the fact that manly men drink budweiser. Even the Doritos labor ad I feel didn’t appeal to women but more towards men.
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