Any company worth a damn (and worth millions) wants an ad featured during the Super Bowl. Regardless of who’s playing, the game consistently pulls in higher ratings than just about anything else on the air, and all those eyes can equal a ton of sales.
These days however, it’s not enough to simply air an awesome commercial and leave it at that. In order to really make your product stick in the audience’s head, you need to keep pushing once the ads end and the game starts.
To that end, more and more ads are directing viewers online to continue the experience. Whether it be extra content, a cool contest, or a chance to become part of the campaign itself, advertisers are learning that connecting with their consumers on the Net is just as effective as connecting with them on front of the TV.
Here are a few companies that know exactly how to hook you during the Super Bowl, and keep you hooked long after the final whistle blows and everybody forgets about football for the next six months:
1. Axe: Lifeguard
Commercials for Axe body spray all share the same simple message: spray this stuff all over your skin and gorgeous women will practically worship you. Their long-running has become so effective that they don’t even need to show guys spraying themselves anymore; it’s just implied.
That’s what happened in this 2013 Super Bowl ad, where a woman is drowning and about to be eaten by a shark, both at the same time. A hunky lifeguard saves her, and the two lock eyes. However, she immediately runs off when she sees an astronaut walking down the beach, in full spacesuit no less. Maybe he ran out of sunscreen and decided to protect himself in another way. Whatever the reason, she falls in lust with him because he’s been to space AND uses Axe Apollo body spray, and the two embrace.
Once Axe established that spacemen are sex gods, they directed their viewers to go online to axeapollo.com, where they could enter to win a trip to space. This wasn’t a phony deal, by the way — last month, 23 winners completed the training for a free space-cation courtesy of the Space Expedition Corporation, a company devoted to popularizing space tourism. They’ll likely blast of by 2015.
Regardless of whether or not body spray works in space, the combination of a memorable ad and awesome online continuity worked wonders for Axe.
2. Pepsi: Controlling Justin Timberlake
Pepsi knows what people like — soda, free stuff, Justin Timberlake, and grown men getting hit in the nards. Their 2008 Super Bowl ad delivered all of that, both on and offline.
In the ad, Justin is magically manipulated by Pepsi, flying in the air uncontrollably every time a girl sips her soft drink. In his travels, he crashes into walls, falls underwater, collides with an annoyed cow, knocks a car door off its hinges, and nearly gets obliterated by an 18-wheeler.
After his journey ends in front of the Pepsi-drinking lady, we find out all this happened because Pepsi can “get you closer” to things like Timberlake MP3s. Not to mention the 52-inch TV that them flies straight into his cranium because the girl’s Dad was also drinking Pepsi.
Once abusing a pop star had run its course, Pepsi directed viewers to go to PepsiStuff.com to score a slew of cool stuff, simply by drinking Olympic-size swimming pools full of their product. As we’ve already established, people like stuff, so letting them know they can go online and get stuff, when they’re already happy and amused by your commercial, was pure capitalistic genius.
3. Oreo: A Real Quiet Riot
There’s a war raging among Oreo lovers: cookie vs. cream. In this 2013 Super Bowl commercial, it was enough to spark an argument that escalated into a full-on riot involving police intervention. Of course, since the setting was a library, everybody whispered the entire time, even the cop “yelling” into his megaphone for everyone to stop fighting.
This simple premise led to a call for viewers to go to Oreo’s Instagram and “choose their side.” Audience participation stunts generally work well, because most viewers enjoy feeling like they’re part of something. It tells them that the company is interested in what they have to say. And it worked here as well, as many people went online to submit photos of their favorite part of an Oreo, which was then turned into a cookie or creme sculpture by official Oreo artists.
Oreo’s Instagram account (and therefore social media presence) grew massively, with their 2200 pre-game followers being joined by over 56,000 new converts. Presumably, many of them took to the Internet during the game’s 35-minute blackout (which Oreo also took masterful advantage of.)
4. GoDaddy: Multiple Ads
Of course, no article about Super Bowl ads with online continuity would be complete without the most well-known purveyors of the art, GoDaddy. The popular web hosting service has played several racy, sexually suggestive ads during the big game, such as the one above featuring a beautiful model wearing nothing but GoDaddy bodypaint. At the end, Each the ad directs you to click on GoDaddy.com for the full, “unrated” version. Well, hot dog!
Of course, the full version isn’t even close to “too hot for TV,” since there’s no way GoDaddy could air porn on their site. Instead, we were treated to a full-body shot of the model, who was in fact wearing a bikini. She had more body paint on this time, such as the site’s hosting costs taking up the entirety of her back. But no, nothing could’ve gotten them fined, though the joke at the end about the bodypaint possibly being lead-based probably raised a few eyebrows.
As annoying as a bait-and-switch can be, the fact that GoDaddy has done this several times over proves that it’s a successful campaign. Perhaps some people still believe there will be nudity this time around, or perhaps we all know there’s nothing to see here, but we click anyway to have something to snark about. Either way, GoDaddy teases with chicks, and gets the clicks.
It’s a virtual guarantee that this year’s Super Bowl will feature several ads enticing you to click over to the company’s site to continue the adventure. In fact, don’t be surprised if just about all of them do it. We do live in the future, after all.
Jason Iannone is a writer and editor for hire, and will be watching the Super Bowl like everyone else, though if his Patriots aren’t in it, he’ll likely have much vodka at his side while doing so.