Everything these days seems to have to revolve around social media in one way or another and one would have though that the huge ad platform of the Super Bowl we would have seen much more of advertisers trying to connect using social media hooks.
Well it turns out that this isn’t the case as fresh analysis from the Altimeter Group shows that 32% of the 87 ads that were run during the Super Bowl stayed away from not only social media but also any online references of any kind.
As Drew Olanoff noted at The Next Web this showed that some companies are still “playing it safe” when it comes to including their online presence in their major advertising messages.
In what I’ll call “playing it safe”, it appears that most companies who did make reference to a presence on the Internet, chose to use their own URL rather than a hashtag or Facebook URL. Why is this? It has to do with controlling the message, obviously.
If I’m company and I’m spending a lot of money on the biggest television stage in the United States, there’s absolutely no way I’m going to ask millions of people to use a hashtag. There’s just no context to be had there and nothing to be gained. As we’ve seen with a recent McDonalds hashtag gaffe , it might actually cost you more money and brand integrity to defend something gone awry.
I have to agree with Drew on this and additionally I find it interesting that rather than push their company’s social media pages on places like Facebook they were opting to only show direct links to their own domain pages.
This hearkens back to a long held belief by many online people that companies and people should have direct control of their online identities and “Google juice” rather than farming it all out to social media data silos like Facebook and Twitter.
While Facebook and the like might be good for spot promotion type things I don’t believe that companies, or individuals who make their living from the web, should be putting all their eggs in the social network providers control.
image courtesy of The Next Web
