Super Bowl ads kickoff a new trend

The kickoff was the end of the countdown and the beginning of Super Bowl XLVI, but it didn’t just start the game. Over 100 million people tuned in to watch the game, the commercials, and halftime.

Like ever year, the hype before and after the Super Bowl revolved around the ads. According to Peter McGraw, Associate Marketing Professor at CU, the ads are a bigger deal than everyday commercials.

“The commercials have become their own phenomenon, and people tune in to the Super Bowl to just watch the commercials. They have become a competition,” said McGraw.

The competition between Super Bowl ads is not new. Professor McGraw also said that the commercials are taken more seriously because they are ranked against each other.

On average, a thirty-second spot during the Super Bowl costs 3.3 million dollars. The cost is high, the stakes are high, and the competition is always fierce.

This year, advertisers experimented with a new trend. About 16% of the ads used social media, while some others referred to online sites and incentives. By using hash-tags and referring people to online, advertisers are attempting to grab the attention of viewers in a new way.

With social media playing a new role, advertisers will begin to engage and grab the attention of viewers via things like Twitter and Facebook.

By the end of the Super Bowl, tweets per second and Facebook comments surrounding one topic reached an all time high. There was a record of 4,064 tweets per minute and close to 11.5 million Facebook comments.

“The old way of marketing is rapidly changing,” said Professor McGraw, “so for students who are interested in advertising, they have to know social media.”

Here at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Advertising students are required to take courses where they learn and practice the skills in order to use social media. Zoe Hatch, a senior in the advertising program expressed how difficult it is to actually brand something through social media.

“I took an Ad Media course, where we had to brand ourselves. In order to do that we had to use Facebook, blog about it, create a Twitter and you had to learn how hard it actually is to brand yourself and get customers to pay attention to you," said Hatch.

The Journalism and Mass Communication Advertising curriculum strengthens students' abilities to use social media by offering courses and preparing students for the new trends and those still to come in advertising.