Superbowl 45 broke records. Record breaking 111.3 million viewers. Record 10,000 tweets per second in the final 3 minutes of the game. Most-watched halftime show ever by 114 million viewers. Did Superbowl 45 generate a new trend for advertisements too?
Social media is prevalent. It’s no secret. One of the keys to good advertisements is the incorporation of a call to action, either through a link to a website, a deal, or a link to social media. As I’ve discussed before with the #McDStories and #BeBold promoted hashtag failures by McDonalds and RIM respectively, company-generated social media campaigns are hard to manage. It didn’t seem to stop companies from taking the plunge within their ads during the Superbowl.
Last year, Audi incorporated a hashtag into their advertisement for the first time, setting a trend for this year’s ads. Last year, it was an ad promoting a departure from old-school luxury trying to rejuvenate their brand image, using the hashtag #ProgressIs. The hashtag was small and understated, compared to the blatant and bold promotion of their hashtag this year. Generating considerable buzz, many experts considered it the campaign of the week!
Audi: #SoLongVampires
Bud Light: #makeitplatinum
H&M David Beckham Underwear: #beckhamforhm
Jack in the Box: #marrybacon
Hulu Plus: #mushymush
General Electric: #WhatWorks
Best Buy: #betterway
You would have thought they would take the hint from McDonalds and RIM #epicfail-ing at trying to shape social media interaction. With a record-breaking amount of Tweeting going on during the Superbowl, it comes as no surprise that even these giant corporations lost some control of the message.
Personally, I thought it was an interesting way of generating discussion on social media. Given my feelings about McDonalds and RIM’s misguided efforts, I had a good internal laugh. In fact, I helped mismanage these hashtags, using them to discuss what I didn’t like about the advertisements of a lot of these companies, including Audi and H&M David Beckham Underwear. However, I also played into their intended purpose for companies like General Electric.
Interestingly, I found that I remembered the hashtags in some instances and not the company to which they referred. For example, even as I was writing this blog post I linked “#makeitplatinum” with Molson and not Bud Light. More evidence that perhaps these company-generated hashtags are not necessarily achieving the desired goals. Also, ads like Clint Eastwood’s Halftime in America generated significant buzz with consumers generating #halftimeinamerica on their own. This goes to show that a good ad can have the desired effect without the company generating it themselves.
Overall, statistics suggest these companies that directly engaged consumers with their social media received greater presence in online discussions. I’m interested to see if this trend will continue beyond the Superbowl. I plan to watch and ultimately analyze the response to these hashtags, results that will be presented in the coming weeks.
With the ongoing increase in social media use, a call to action directing consumers to corporate accounts will undoubtedly increase engagement. I believe that such direct calls to action are valuable, but am interested to see how companies manage the potential misuse of things like hashtags. In my last posting, I proposed some methods of controlling discussion in an effort to mitigate negativity and preventing evolution into bashtags; is this enough?
So today I leave you with some questions: Do you engage with company-generated hashtags? If so, is it done in the way they intend or do you turn it into a bashtag?
sustainanerd 