Superbowl Sunday is this weekend so if you’re American, this is a big, big weekend. Even bigger than the actual game is the excitement around the ads that are shown before, during and after the game.
To appreciate how big of a deal this potential audience of 110 milion consumers is, know that some of the biggest companies in the world including Mercedes Benz, Coca Cola, Volkswagen and Anheuser-Busch, are paying up to 4 million dollars for each 30seconds of airtime for their ads to show on Sunday.
With the stakes so high, it makes sense that advertisers want to capitalize on their investments and nearly half of the advertisers have put out teasers in advance of Sunday. This is a way of pique people’s interest before the actual ad on Sunday. But this has already caused some issues with two of the ads – Coca Cola and Volkswagen being labelled as racist by Arabs and Jamaicans respectively!
Other companies are using the ads to interact with consumers. Toyota called out for pictures of consumers on Twitter or Instagram, and will feature one winner in one of its ads. Pepsi has also asked fans for their photos, and plan to use a few hundred of them in the introduction to its halftime show starring Beyonce.
Doritos, Coca-Cola and Audi are also relying on crowd sourcing for their ads, and won’t be unveiling the final product until the Super Bowl. Doritos is running its Crash the Super Bowl contest — in which fans submit Youtube videos and viewers vote for one of the top five — for the seventh consecutive year. Coca-Cola and Audi have also released teasers for their commercials, but ask viewers to vote on the outcome. Coca-Cola’s features three teams racing for soda, while Audi’s spot stars a boy who arrives dateless to his prom but is emboldened by his dad’s 2013 Audi S6 high-performance sport sedan.
Not sure any of the 30 or so ads will beat the one from last with featuring the young boy dressed as Darth Vadar trying to start his dads Audi using his mind! Still my favourite.
Check out all the ads here