The orgy of bombastic advertising self-love otherwise known as the Super Bowl, the National Football League’s annual championship game, has become a prisoner of the web and social media, and cannot justify the outrageous cost of broadcast TV spots. This was particularly evident in Super Bowl LIII’s mostly miscued spots and lost opportunities, highlighted even further by the lowest-scoring Super Bowl of all time.

All of this sounds familiar: brands using the bullhorn and the pie in the face to scream over the din. But that isn’t the real issue: it’s a lack of understanding where the audience is. The audience for the Super Bowl is everywhere (even on smart speakers), not just TV, and while TV is still king, it can no longer justify a one-screen-fits-all story.

What mystifies me about Super Bowl LIII’s ads is the lack of innovation, of 2^nd-screen and even 3^rd-screen interactive installations, calls to action, or use of technology that would make a non-football fan interested in a brand’s message. Why merely put up 30 seconds of overstuffed hyperbole and visual mayhem on broadcast television when you can leverage people’s more ubiquitous viewing screens: their mobile devices. This seems to me to be a travesty of capitulation, not mere conservatism.

I say that the Super Bowl ads are a prisoner of the web for a few reasons. One, it seems that brands are so skittish about instantaneous negative or critical reactions to spots that they are not taking any risks. This blandness and message sanitization is the curse of corporate communications in an age of increased polarization and, yes, fake news, but it doesn’t make sense if you are spending $5 million for a spot, on top of production and promotion costs. The “go big or go home” mantra for the world’s biggest advertising moment (never mind that more people watch the World Cup Final than the Super Bowl) seems to have been reduced to “go safe, or go home.” Secondly, the prisoner analogy seems apt in the way that brands now seem to have capitulated to the idea that whatever transmedia implementation they might embark upon is not worth the risk, or is only of interest to a tiny sliver of the audience. In an era of short-form content (even with the death of Vine), there seems to be much more that brands can do around the Super Bowl.

To be fair, the spots that were well-produced (Bud Light, Budweiser, Turkish Airlines, Weather Tech, to name a few) either have longstanding audiences and built-in online and social media audiences, but one would have expected some kind of prompt to an app or web extension, or even Facebook conversation. The mere fact that Ridley Scott returned to the Super Bowl with the cinematic thriller of an ad for Turkish Airlines was exciting, and had a nice call to action. The Burger King spot with Andy Warhol eating a Whopper in 1982 was amazing just for the site of Warhol eating a Whopper. Who knew? This was from a Swedish film, and the Warhol segment has been posted on YouTube. Perhaps #EatLikeAndy will catch on, and become part of a larger campaign, but there is no interactive component. Warhol would have found this a waste. He would have pulled all kinds of tricks with our mobile devices, game consoles, and even smart speakers. It was ironic that he showed up on this Super Bowl ad roster, in this sense.

And, yes, one of the few tech-related ads, from Amazon Alexa, was a massive failure of imagination and use of the technology. No spiffs for users of Alexa, no interesting narrative about the technology, and no tie-in via Amazon’s many sites (or, for that matter, Whole Foods). Just a colossal waste of time and money, with Harrison Ford (yes, get Han Solo and his dog to sell a backward message about what Alexa doesn’t do well) looking old and cranky. This was quite sad to see, on an evening where few tech companies were advertising.

If the Super Bowl really were the kind of event that we would all watch, regardless of our football affinities, the NFL and the broadcaster would make it as participatory as possible, leveraging more than 8K cameras, surround sound or the latest iso camera position. But, under fire for its handling of Colin Kaepernick and the Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) lawsuits that former players have filed, the NFL and its advertisers seemed to feel under pressure from a blitz – from its own would-be audience. Hopefully, Super Bowl LIV will “LIV” up a greater expectation for putting on a show, and actually having fun with its audience, instead of just talking to themselves. And playing it safe.

Take a listen to my conversation with my brother, Fred Pfaff, on the hits and misses of Super Bowl LIII ads, which we conducted on February 4, 2019 over lunch at P.J. Clarke’s at Lincoln Center, New York City. You can listen at: https://soundcloud.com/chris-pfaff-1/chris-and-fred-pfaff-discussing-super-bowl-liii-ads

Fred Pfaff (left) and me, at P.J. Clarke’s at Lincoln Center, NYC

As more TV is delivered over IP networks, and as more mobile viewing takes place, the synched TV-mobile experience will soon become a more enriched unit for advertisers and a fun – yes, you heard that word! – way for consumers to enjoy ads. Again.

Approximately 84% of TV viewers are dual-screeners (according to Mary Meeker KPCB Internet Trends 2014), and that figure jumped 200% since the 2012 London Olympics. More significantly, those dual-screen viewers are spending 50% of their viewing time using a second device (Millward Brown Abreaction, ‘Marketing in a Multiscreen World, 2014). During ad breaks, 67% of the audience shifts to mobile (United Internet Media, 2014).

As contextual content – user-aware; location-aware content served to individuals – increases, the synched ad solution market will rise. Solutions from the EU 2nd screen market have, so far, led the way. Paris-based Sync (a spin-off from Visiware) conducted the first such unit placement during the half-time of the 2014 FIFA World Cup Final. The perfectly synched spot, a rich animated interactive ad unit for smartphones and tablets in the app of L’Equipe (France’s top sports app, with more than 9 million downloads), highlighted the precision of Gillette razors, and included a contextual game, asking users to guess the precision of the shots during the first half, and instantly provided users with the live result. The unit, created by Sync’s patented Sync2Ad unit, which was developed by the Visiware studio, bridged the gap between TV And mobile advertising, between the brand and individual consumers. More than half of the top 20 French apps currently have installed the Sync2Ad SDK, and Sync is actively signing partnerships for Sync2Ad in other countries. The new ad format creates unique additional high-value inventory for publishers, and can be used for their own promotional purposes.

In-app advertising is far more likely to gain the attention of viewers, who are well used to blocking ads on their desktop browsers. What will likely happen is an understanding of how gamification can reward the synched ad viewer. When Yahoo! streams the NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and the Jacksonville Jaguars from London on October 25th, the worlds of TV and mobile will undoubtedly collide. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo! and its ad agency and ad network partners view this experience. And, yes, how the NFL – no stranger to the 2nd screen world – sees the synched ad experience. So far, the U.S. market has seen small steps toward synched TV-mobile ads. Xaxis launched an attempt in this field in the spring of 2014, and NBC has made in-roads with Never.no, a Norwegian 2nd screen solutions provider. But, overall, the mobile ad shift has not lived in the synched universe.

The hurdles overcome with user privacy surrounding Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) has hampered some of the progress in this arena. Also, critical mass is an issue for app publishers. Meaning, unless there is a solid audience using apps while TV spots are aired, or with devices that have apps live or open, the opportunity may be lost. This is where gamification lends itself to the experience. A synched spot needs to have true bi-directionality to really enhance the experience, where users could, in a game construct, lead to new levels of play or engagement. This is nothing that the SMS marketing world has not known for years, and has done with great success in the participatory TV genre that has included ‘American Idol,’ ‘America’s Got Talent,’ and other war horse shows that have, literally, taught the U.S. population to text.

TV as we know, and the ad units that support it, need to change just as live TV has changed radically in the past decade. When on-demand streamers such as Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix figure out how to engage viewers with synched spots, the arena will expand dramatically. And, one can only hope, create more fun for TV viewers.

Click on, people. Click on.