2nd Screen and the Super Bowl

Super Bowl Sunday is this weekend and 2nd screen promises to be a major part of it. Facebook and Twitter both have Super Bowl home pages set up to aggregate incoming content from fans and official sources. For smartphone users, the NFL has teamed up with Verizon to offer access to the game for just $5, while tablet users can take advantage of the NBC live app and PC users can go to NBC Sports live stream to see the game.

Given that observers estimated CBS scored as much as $12 million in ad revenue last year from its 2nd screen app, the Super Bowl and 2nd Screen is really coming into its own.

Brands are getting into the action too, revving up their hashtags (H&M has already started a twitter-based hashtag promotion to have users select the ending for their Super Bowl spot.) So with that in mind, we thought it was best to review some of the dos and dont’s for Super Bowl Sunday brand interactions.

The biggest mistake many brands will make is to assume that viewers want to stop watching the game (or the other commercials!) and pay attention to what they have to say. So they’ll have some sort of online component to the ad (via Shazam, a sponsored Tweet or synched app) that forces the viewer to spend time playing around with whatever “experience” the brand has cooked up, which they will assure themselves is so clever the viewer will not be able to look away.

I can guarantee you this will not be the case, that the brand experience will be much less compelling than what’s happening on the big screen with the game and the viewer will become rather annoyed by the brand asking them to turn away.

Solution: Make sure the consumer can do the online portion later. Let them bookmark it by favoriting a tweet with a link in it or something similar. That way they can concentrate on the game when it’s on and pay attention to your brand later, when they are able give you their full attention.

Another common mistake is for brands who have no connection to the game to try and glom onto to hoopla. And by “no connection” I mean they’re not running an ad, they’re not a sponsor, and their product has zero connection to football or even the halftime show. Yet there will no doubt be brands using social media in an attempt to establish some sort of synergy with the event (without having to actually pay for it.)

It’s a risky move because the odds of seeming like an interloper are much, much higher than the odds of seeming like the fun party crasher. There’s also the question of how to get people to pay attention to your social media feed on a day when every other brand is out there too, and all of you are fighting for their attention.

Solution: Either pony up for a sponsorship or promotion of some sort or sit this one out. It’s not worth all that effort just to be ignored.

A final no-no is the notorious real time tweet. Yes, Oreo got a lot of kudos for their “dunk in the dark” tweet during the blackout a few years back. But realistically, how many people who don’t work in media are aware of that tweet? And, not to diminish its cleverness, but one of the reasons it worked so well was that no one else was doing anything like it.

That’s not the case today. I would not be surprised if somewhere north of 100 brands were all gearing up in a fight to the death to make the wittiest comment about the game. Which is great and all, only who is going to be listening? To repeat an earlier caveat, fans want to concentrate on the game or on the commercials that are running during the game.

They do not want to concentrate on your clever tweets (which they’ll only see if they’re following your brand and their feed isn’t running a mile a minute because it’s the Super Bowl and Twitter always gets quirky during the Super Bowl because their servers can’t handle the load and they manage to pick your clever real time tweets out from the dozens of other clever tweets in their feeds.)

Solution: Rather than running with the pack, try sponsorships and promotions that take advantage of the fact that your target is watching a football game. (Or a halftime show.) Relevance to both the brand and the game is critical. As is utility to your intended audience. You need to be unique and memorable too (e.g throwing up a social wall is a lovely thought, but nobody’s going to remember a social wall, let alone who sponsored it.) Those are all pretty obvious caveats, but I’m always amazed how many otherwise savvy people don’t seem to understand that you can’t force fit your brand to an event that has little relevance to your brand and to the people who might buy your product.

The single smartest thing your brand can do though is take advantage of all the data you’re getting from the second screen during the game. Who is retweeting you? How are people coming to your website? What’s their demographic? What tweets or Instagram postings or Snaps got the most traction? What’s going on in the game when people respond to you?

You’ve got the world’s largest television audience on Sunday. Use it to your advantage to learn things about your customers and how and why they respond to your brand. That’s far more valuable than any noise you can make.

We’ll be back next week to review the games 2nd screen and social TV winners and losers, giving our call on how the various apps and brand strategies performed. Stay tuned.

This post originally appeared on the 2nd Screen Society blog.