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So this is what Toshiba spent $3 million on?

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I actually missed this commercial yesterday and I’m glad I did. Part of me expected something spectacular while the other half expected something pretty piss-poor. Looks like the latter won out. I can’t really blame Toshiba for not dishing out the extra money to produce something worth noting. After all, you’ve already wasted millions to secure a spot during the Super Bowl and when you know you’re going the way of the dodo, you might as well save what you can. So, be sure to run out and pick up that HD DVD player for $150. I hear it makes a great upconverting DVD player or coaster for your next get together.



Behind the scenes of the 3D SoBe Super Bowl commercial

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You should know by now that there are going to be 3D Super Bowl Commercials. Right? Anyway, SoBe has produced a behind the scenes look at its commercial. Hopefully the real thing isn’t as craptacular as this clip; it probably will be though. Video after the break and remember, you’ve been warned.


Check out G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra trailer before its Super Bowl debut

One more: The Super Bowl Star Trek trailer

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Got to be honest, it looks great, but I’m more pumped ’bout the G.I. Joe movie after that trailer. Still, this Star Trek one looks amazing in HD.


3D Super Bowl commercials poll: Hot or Not?

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So what didja think ’bout the 3D commercials? Monsters and Aliens looks like a sweet movie but did the 3D trailer make you wanna see it more? Oh, and how ’bout the SoBe dancing lizard one? Me? I thought they were lame.

Sound off after the jump with a quick poll.

{democracy:55}

Comcast confuses porn with the Super Bowl

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Oh man. Someone is going to lose their job [life?] over this. The story goes that just after the Cardinals scored their last touchdown, Tucson, AZ Comcast viewers were interrupted with a bit of porn. We’re talking male full frontal swinging in the air nudity here and not just a brief wardrobe malfunction from a few years ago. The peep show continues on for about 10 seconds and ends halfway through the male protagonist’s helicopter impersonation.

So this video is seriously NSFW. It is porn. Okay.


The Super Bowl economic stimulus should result in 2.6 million HDTV sold

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The Super Bowl is a major economic force and should cause 2.6 million HDTVs sold this year – or so says the CEA. After all, it is the biggest football game of the year and people love an excuse to gather. No doubt some used the digital switch or so-called liquidation sales as an excuse to plop down money on a swanky new HDTV.

But now that the festivities are done, I wonder how many of those 2.6 million HDTVs will be returned for a full refund. Trust me, it happens a lot and a month from now is a great time to score a good deal on a slightly used HDTV as retailers try to unload ‘em.


Seattle chowder joint runs half-second Super Bowl ad

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How did I miss this? Actually, I guess it’d be pretty easy. And since I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, that makes it a little easier. Ivar’s, my favorite Northwest chowder house and chippy, ran a half-second ad during the Super Bowl, which you probably didn’t even know you saw. I believe that makes it the shortest broadcast commercial ever, even with the run on virals and blipverts this year.

I’m surprised they allowed it to run, not because of the minimum length for commercials, but because it’s essentially subliminal advertising. Well, I can’t stay mad at Ivar’s. I just had some of their chowder the other day, and damn it’s good.



World's first Twitter party? Ron and Fez Super Bowl Twitter party this Sunday (and you can win knissors!)

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Look at all these prizes~!

This may be a first: a Twitter Super Bowl party! Sirius XM’s Ron and Fez is having some sort of Twitter party celebrating The Big Game. Trivia, prizes, virtual booze, Chris Stanley passed out at a speakeasy in Long Island City—what more could you want? Oh, that’s not enough for you? Then how about a pair of knissors signed by East Side Dave McDonald, whom I interviewed last summer?

It’s pretty easy to join the fun. All you have to do is follow @202Friends, the radio show’s Twitter feed. Once Sunday rolls around, be sure to check the feed for trivia questions. The first to answer, wins. Done and done.

There’s other prizes besides the knissors, not that you’d need anything other than knissors, or course. You can be in the running for sports goodies signed by true legends like Jerome Bettis, Michael Strahan, and Bruce Jenner. There’s also items signed by Bill Cosby and Aubrey Plaza, who plays April on Parks and Recreation. She’s a fellow NYU alum, so that’s neat.

So yeah, a Twitter Super Bowl party. This is truly the future.


Looks Like Google May Have A Super Bowl Commercial

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While Google is a company built on advertising, for the most part it has stayed out of advertising itself on the dominant medium: television. Yes, there have been those short ads for Chrome and a few for Android that it has been involved with. And Google is even said to have considered an ad during the Olympics, but that was killed at the last second, apparently. But now, it looks like Google may be ready to advertise itself on the biggest stage possible: the Super Bowl.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just posted this very intriguing tweet:

Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”)

It’s hard to know exactly what he’s saying there, but it would seem to suggest that Google will have an ad that will run during the third quarter of tomorrow’s game. If that is indeed the case, who knows what product it will be for — but the “hell has frozen over” comment is interesting. Could Google be running an ad to promote Google.com itself to counter Microsoft’s Bing ads? We’ll all be watching.

Below watch one of Google’s Chrome television ads.

Update: After some internal discussion, we think it could be a Nexus One ad (which Google said during its launch event that it wasn’t likely to do outside of the web). Some commenters seem to be agreeing as well.

Update 2: John Battelle believes the ad will be about Google “search stories” and singles out this “Parisian Love” ad below.


TiVo sez Doritos commercial was the biggest hit in the Super Bowl

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Thanks to TiVo, we have a pretty good idea of what the most popular commercials from last night’s Super Bow. Survey says: that Doritos commercial with the little kid telling his mom’s date to keep his hands off his mother (fat chance!) and off his Doritos. America is a peculiar little country, isn’t it, cheese-flavored chips and light beer as far as the eye can see.

How does TiVo know this? Because for every second you watch TV, data is sent to TiVo HQ, and the company is able to parse the data to see, for example, what commercial did people choose to see again and again. All of this information is anonymous, so please put away your tin foil hat.

Other big commercials include:

• The Snickers one with Betty White

• The Focus on the Family one (the “anti-abortion” commercial)

• The Doritos one with the guy and the dog collar thing

• The Intel one with the sad robot (I marked out at all the Intel ones because I bought a Core i7 860 in December and overclocked it to 3.8GHz~!)

That’ll do. At the Super Bowl party I attended, the most popular commercial was the one with the stuffed animals partying in Las Vegas, the Kia one. But the big take-away was, “meh, these commercials are whack.”

What commercials did y’all like? Like I said, my group was sorta underwhelmed by them.


Motorola Attacks Apple In Super Bowl Commercial

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Super Bowl is just around the corner, and that means it’s the one and only time people anticipate commercials more than the game. Motorola has released a teaser for their Super Bowl commercial and it criticizes Apple. Their message is that “2011 is [actually] a lot like 1984.” The 1984 reference dates back to Apple’s own Super Bowl commercial where they excoritated IBM for being controlling.

Motorola is using Apple’s own message against them. Motorola claims Apple offers only one way to work, with one design and one authority and that people want more choices. Also, Motorola feels that their products are better by offering more speed, flexibility and freedom.

Electronista thinks that the ad is somewhat disingenuous of Motorola because:

Motorola will only have one tablet on launch and won’t have a second model until late 2011. It has also been one of the most restrictive Android device makers and has a bootloader lock that forces deeper hacks to install the user’s choice of firmware. iPhones have a more closed OS but also don’t have as tough firmware restrictions.

No matter what Motorola says, it’s ultimately up to customers, and they seem to be okay with 1984,


Foursquare Enables First "Promoted" Venue And Badge Redemption Codes For The Super Bowl

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When it comes to making money, Twitter’s approach right now is their group of Promoted Products. That is, the Promoted Tweets, Promoted Users, and Promoted Trending Topics that brands pay for in order to get more exposure. And now this coming Sunday, it looks like Foursquare will begin testing the same type of thing.

Specifically, during the Super Bowl, Foursquare is going to have a “Promoted Trending Venue” for the first time. What’s interesting is that it won’t actually be a real venue, instead it will be “Super Bowl Sunday”, which Foursquare hopes everyone will check-in to when it’s placed at the very top of the “Trending Now” area within the Places area on Foursquare’s mobile apps. Undoubtedly, a ton of people will. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up as the most checked-in venue of all time when all is said and done. Because again, Foursquare is promoting it across the platform.

So, is Foursquare making any money off of this? Right now, Foursquare’s Erin Gleason will only say that this feature is something they’re “experimenting with“. “We thought the NFL would be the perfect partner to try this out for the first time since there’s such a huge sense of community around Super Bowl viewing,” she continues. I’ve asked for clarification just to make sure they’re not making any money off of this deal.

Another element to these Super Bowl check-in is that if you shout which team you’re rooting for, you’ll get a badge — so either a Packers or Steelers badge. And these badges will apparently come with unique redemption codes that will give badge holders a 20 percent discount on merchandise at NFLShop.com. So it’s possible that Foursquare has some sort of monetary deal worked out with the NFL for this entire thing (promoted venue and all).

Foursquare’s Erin Gleason notes that this will be the first time unique redemption codes are attached to badges. Yes, that sounds like another monetization option to me. If not now, certainly in the future.

And yes, there will be a special badge if you’re actually at the game in Dallas on Sunday.

Update: Foursquare has confirmed that this is not a paid sponsorship, just a trial.


The Top 5 Super Bowl Commercials Already Out

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There isn’t anything quite like Super Bowl commercials. For many of you, it’s the best part of the game. So we thought we’d show you ahead of time some of our favorites that have already come out.

Just so you know, this year is being considered The Year of the Autos, with many of the companies getting back into profits and all. The big automakers have purchased about one-third of all air time. Maybe it’s because all these commercials are longer than 30 sec.

5. Volkswagen Beetle

This of course is to get you ready for the next-gen Beetle on its way later this year. Nothing much here, just a little clever.

4. Chrysler

I agree with the message here, but does it need to take longer than a minute?

3. Audi

We like Audi, we really do, but this commercial is..well, interesting. It gets third place since it’s such a mindf***.

2. Kia Optima

Pretty neat, reminds me of those Russian nested dolls. Feel the fractals.

1. Volkswagen Passat

This is one that I can say is my favorite. It’s got all the right stuff: nostalgia, Star Wars, cute kid and a silver Chevy Impala.

Bonus: Motorola Xoom


Tech Returns To The Super Bowl Big Time, An Ad Roundup

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For those of us who know nothing about football, the Super Bowl is more about what the huge brands who buy ads chose to do with their millions of dollars worth of prime eyeball time, paying to play with a captive audience in the hundreds of millions. And the technology industry always steps up to the plate; Apple aired its famous 1984 ad during the Super Bowl and so did Web 1.0 symbol Pets.com. Last year Google debuted its “Parisian Love” ad. We had quite a few tech firsts this year, including the first ever Twitter hashtag within an ad.

The Doritos pant-sniffing guy won the minds and heards of Twitter, but nonetheless it seems like the tech sector had a strong showing. Between the daily deals site commercial wars and GoDaddy’s superbowl ad suicide and all the non-tech commercials that seemed to incorporate tech elements like a hashtag in the case of Audi #ProgressIs and The Chevy Cruise ad that inadvertently encouraged Facebook stalking, the message is clear: The Internet is here to stay.

And while the tech sector made multiple appearances tonight, the biggest play was made by Rupert Murdoch’s ‘The Daily.’ Murdoch’s ad buy offered nothing distinctive branding-wise but cost $3 million dollars, which means that he could have offered a year subscription at $40 to 75K people instead of buying the ad. Something tells me that might have been a better strategy.

In the meantime, here’s a roundup of this year’s tech related ads in order of appearance (I’m including online-only properties like Cars.com), with some honorary mentions at the end. You can find my snarky commentary about each on Twitter, as always.

By the way, I have no idea which team actually won.

Groupon: Save The Money, Whales

LivingSocial: Changed My Life

AT&T: Don’t Be Left Behind

Go Daddy : Joan Rivers

Teleflora.com: Faith Hill, Rack

Motorola Xoom Tablet: Empower The People

Careerbuilder: Parking Lot

Carmax.com

Chatter: Will.i.am #1

Chatter: Will.i.am # 2

The Daily: America Meet The Daily

Cars.com: #1

E*Trade: #1

Best Buy: How Many Bloody Gs Are There Any ways?

Homeaway.com: #1

Groupon: Save The Money, Tibet

Carmax: #2

Go Daddy # 2: The Contract

Cellular South: Samsung Galaxy S

Verizon: Rule The Air

E*trade: #2

Honorary tech ads:

Chevy: Best First Date Ever

AT&T: #2

Bridgestone: Reply All

Audi: Release The Hounds #ProgressIs

Rio: Sans Angry Birds



Watch 2012 Super Bowl Commercials Now With Facebook + USA Today's Ad Meter

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Facebook USA Today Ad Meter App

Want to watch the big budget Super Bowl commercials, but can’t wait till Sunday or don’t care about football? Facebook and USA Today have just launched Ad Meter, a Facebook app where you can watch many of the TV spots right now. Then from kickoff until Tuesday night you can vote for your favorites. Traditionally an offline poll done live with handheld meters, USA Today has finally brought Ad Meter online so you can judge ads both in real-time and post-game.

Facebook tapped Involver to build the app, and has secured early previews of roughly 20 commercials. The rest of the ads will become available through the app at game time. On Tuesday night at 6pm EST the results of the voting will be announced.

Several Internet companies have plopped down the big bucks this year in an attempt to court the mainstream. Arrested Development’s Gob plugs Hulu, and Teleflora.com touts the lovin you might get if you use it to send a Valentine’s Day gift. Etrade, Careerbuilder.com,

Investing in Super Bowl ads makes more and more sense for web services as the general public becomes more internet savvy. They should tread cautiously, though, considering past ads from Salesforce, Groupon have been voted most disliked and caused PR crises. Let’s hope no one gives our industry a bad wrap this time around. Oh wait, GoDaddy’s ads filled with body-painted models and angels in the cloud are just as sexist as ever.


First Legal Streaming Super Bowl A Success, But Audience Still Denied The Real Show

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Screen shot 2012-02-05 at 6.07.16 PM

Lately, we’ve been seeing more and more big television events come with an online streaming counterpart. Sporting and televised events are showing up online with increasing frequency, with the 2010 Olympics seeming to be one of the first big global events where both viewers and media publicly recognized the power and potential of carrying an event like that online.

This year, for the first time in history, the Super Bowl is being shown online, for free. And it’s completely legal. I was going to say “in a brilliant move by the NFL,” but this should be default. Showing an enormously popular event like the Super Bowl online should not be a “brilliant” move. It should just be second nature. But, wishful thinking aside, the NFL and NBC both wanted to give home viewers options to watch the big game on the Web, without having to rub elbows with the riff raff at a local sports bar.

Interestingly, leading up to the game, over the course of the last week, the Feds began seizing domain names owned by popular sports streaming sites, like Firstrowsports.tv, Firstrowsports.com and Soccertvlive.net, etc. You can read more at TorrentFreak here. Obviously, that action was taken in the name of freedom and preventing piracy, but it’s also in part to protecting the fairly sizable interests of the NFL and NBC.

In spite of that ignominious beginning, especially in light of SOPA and all the controversy lately over seizures like MegaUpload, the streaming online experience tonight during the Super Bowl was pretty amazing. Pre-game coverage started at 2pm on NBCSports.com, with streaming capabilities featuring the ability to pause and rewind, embedded live streams from Twitter and Facebook, and four different camera angles to boot.

While that in and of itself is exciting, the 2012 Super Bowl streaming experience itself left a lot to be desired. The actual banner ads, the online ads being served on NBCSports.com, weren’t particularly offensive, or a pain in the ass. But, the problem is that most people watch the Super Bowl in groups, not as individuals, and most choose to do so through a projector, or streaming the Web onto their TV or a big screen.

In addition, many people watch the Super Bowl strictly for ads or for the halftime show, which, in spite of the ads finding a way to be disappointing each and every year, is a spectacle year in, year out — without fail. Even if the music is awful.

For streaming viewers looking to watch ads in realtime, there was a tab which they could mouse over to watch all the ads after they aired, but the commercials were not shown during the breaks in the online broadcast, when they were actually supposed to air. Streaming viewers who chose not to pick their own commercials just got an enormous eyeful of the same ads, repeating ad nauseam.

Airing on television, live on the boob tube, were the full slate of “creative” ads, from each and every brand; however, airing live on the Web was a loop of GE, Budweiser, and Samsung commercials, punctuated annoyingly by Rainn Wilson, who just became increasingly annoying. The one bonus: Both the Chevy commercial and the Samsung commercial aired online before they did on TV, so streamers got a sneak peek. I realize I may be complaining about small inconveniences, when really I should be celebrating the fact that the Super Bowl was streaming online, legally, for free, but …

For those looking to watch the halftime show, expecting to see Madonna and company, all they got was an endless interview shot in a hallway. Personally, it didn’t completely ruin my Super Bowl experience to be deprived of Madonna’s performance, but it certainly seems that NBC swung and missed on that one. Strike two.

Furthermore, if you are an American living abroad or wanted to watch the biggest football game of the year, NBC only offered limited options, as the network’s broadcast rights didn’t extend internationally.

Sure, increasingly, big sporting events are moving online, but significant limitations endure. The Super Bowl will air on CBS next year, and CBS might as well get started now if it’s going to provide a legitimate alternative.

Including the halftime show in coverage online will be significant, as will providing viewing for international football fans and Americans living abroad. While there was a lot of great functionality, and the quality of the broadcast was pretty good (depending on your Internet connection), and it was very cool to be able to switch between camera views. The future is clearly here, but sometimes it looks blurry in Silverlight.

That being said, NBC definitely has a grin from ear to ear. The game was fantastic, it went down to the last minute, and The Voice still gets to air in primetime on both coasts.

The Super Bowl also proved that spending millions on commercials still can’t buy you creativity, even though geeks were very excited about that Best Buy commercial.


Twitter: In The Final 3 Minutes Of The Super Bowl, There Were 10,000 Tweets Per Second

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Big TV events are becoming an increasingly popular catalyst of activity on social media, with sporting events being at the top of the list. Many of us can no longer enjoy a Super Bowl without checking Twitter every three seconds. Last year, there were several moments during the Super Bowl that set records for the most tweets per second during a sporting event, with a high of 4,064 TPS. Of course, the highs during the Super Bowl were no match for New Years Eve 2011 in Japan, which saw 6,939 tweets per second.

A year later, the Japanese continue to be avid tweeters, as the premiere of Japanese movie “Castles In The Sky” set the all-time record in December for tweets per second, at 25,088.

The TPS record has since been held by Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement at the MTV VMAs, at 8,860 tweets per second, which surpassed the U.S. women’s soccer team’s game at 7,196 Tweets per second. Among other notable Twitter events: Steve Jobs’ death at 6,049, Bin Laden’s death at 5,106 TPS, the day of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in March at 5,530 TPS, and the Royal Wedding in England in April at 3,966 TPS.

Clearly, we are getting a glimpse of the increasing relevance and popularity of Twitter during important events, as Twitter’s official Twitter account (head explosion) announced tonight that, in the final three minutes of Super Bowl 2012, there was an average of 10,000 tweets per second. Obviously, this is less than half the tweet frequency (I’ll coin the “TF” acronym) of the Castles In The Sky premiere, but by all accounts this is the record for TF during a live sporting event.

No doubt the 2012 Olympics in London, and 100 other events will give tonight’s Super Bowl a run for its money, but, for now, let us revel in tweet history.

Twitter will no doubt be sharing more on the activity during the Super Bowl, which we will include as soon as we have it.


Flurry: When The Super Bowl Bored Us, We Opened Apps

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App Usage Vs TV Audience done

During the lackluster moments of this year’s Super Bowl, we turned to our second screens. A study released by Flurry today shows that during great ads and the half-time show we kept our devices stowed, but returns from commercial breaks, boring ads, and waning interest in the 3rd quarter caused spikes in mobile app usage.

This means advertisers and TV producers need to get flashier, because every viewer has a wildly engaging device in their pocket. Subtle, conservative, slow-building ads just don’t cut it any more. 

Overall, the Super Bowl was still more popular in the U.S. than apps, with 111 million people watching the game, while 98 million people accessed mobile apps in the same time period.

Flurry employed a clever new way to measure how entertaining broadcast content is by charting how our often our fickle population moved to check Facebook, Twitter, and play games. The chart above shows dips in app usage during eye-catching ads for Battleship, Coca-Cola’s polar bears, Madonna’s half-time show, and the tense final minutes of the game — which means the only thing people were doing as the clock ran down was updating social media. Tweets spiked to 10,000 per second in the last 3 minutes, the 2nd highest frequency ever.

Hulu, General Motors, and General Electric had the most boring ads according to the study, as app usage spiked while they were on screen. Meanwhile, Verizon’s Droid Razr and TaxAct.com’s ads inspired the least compulsive app usage of the tech companies and websites paying for airtime.

This year’s Super Bowl was the most watched television program in history and more people in the US watched it than opened apps. Next year the NFL might not be so lucky, though. It will have to analyze what moments caused spikes in app usage, and consider how to jazz them up. The streaming experience could also use some refinement, considering it didn’t show the half time and made users click around to see the commercials.


Every Other Tech Angle You Need For Super Bowl XLVII

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Millions of people across the U.S. are preparing their jerseys, face paint and horrific nachos. Yes, football fans rejoice, the big game finally kicks off tomorrow in New Orleans — that is, Super Bowl XLVII, between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Franciso 49ers. The Super Bowl is always one of the biggest media events each year, and our inboxes have been flooded with “OMG this is going to be the most social Super Bowl EVAR” emails for weeks now.

It’s going to be a close, hard-fought game between two teams that most people will probably know nothing about until kickoff. But because the Super Bowl has become such a spectacle, there are tons of things to pay attention to on the web and on social media while stuffing your face with fried food and trying to watch the game while asking your friends what happened on the last play.

But don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to ask your friends what happened on the last play — because one could take a short nap between plays in a football game. The WSJ and others have found that while the average duration of a football broadcast is 185 minutes, the actual time the ball is in motion (read: the time teams are actually running plays) is 11 or 12 minutes. That’s 6 percent of the broadcast, give or take. Just another reason you should be watching hockey.

My personal gripes aside, let’s move into the playbooks of a few silver linings (see what I did there?): After NBC’s half-botched inaugural attempt last year, the Super Bowl will be legally streamed on the Interwebs for the second time tomorrow, thanks courtesy of a new host: NFL.com and CBSSports.com.

The Super Bowl streaming on the Web is a great thing in principle; however, last year’s webcast only picked up about 2 million viewers compared to television’s 100 million (so clearly networks don’t care about the web cannibalizing viewers yet), and some questions remain. Ryan has the full take here.

Let’s be honest, there are really only a few other technical/digital-related things that people care about (or should care about) in relation to the Super Bowl: The ads and betting. You should be consuming chicken wings (or celery sticks if you’re in San Francisco), drinking beer or margaritas, making ridiculous statements about sports things you know nothing about and actually talking to friends/loved ones. Okay, there’s some validity to the whole second/third/fourth-screen experience as it relates to consuming digital media (especially sports content), but seriously, people, put down your phone and/or tablet and talk to someone. Preferably a human, but I’d even prefer your dog to your stupid phone.

So let’s jump in. If you want to get previews of the Super Bowl ads before the game, probably the best place to go is Hulu AdZone, where you can get sneak peeks on upcoming commercials that will air during the game, pick winners, interact on the web and Xbox 360, etc. And Hulu will be archiving and showing the game’s full roster of ads after they appear.

On this front, Twitter also hopes to come to the rescue with #AdScrimmage, which will let fans vote for their favorite commercials (during the game and for 48 hours thereafter), catch the ones they missed, and sneer at the ones you hated. This has become one of the most-enjoyed pastimes for journalists, pundits and fans who don’t care as much about the game. Naturally, most people just talk about the content and are really discussing the work of the creative teams that design the content for the ads.

But, naturally, brands believe that everyone is really talking about them, and in the short-form world of Twitter and social media, they are — to a certain extent. That’s why, unsurprisingly, brands are spending millions on social media sites, paying an armload to become a promoted trend on Twitter for a day — especially considering that the buzz around the Super Bowl now extends for weeks, as brands launch pre-game day campaigns, contests and the like to suck us in. And, admittedly, brands now have good reason to believe that there’s more ROI from social media advertising than coughing up $3.8 million for a 30-second TV spot during the game. According to CBS, those prices are rising, and who would be surprised if that continues for the foreseeable future?

What’s more, brands were able to score twice the amount of Facebook likes when posting about the Super Bowl last year, as Josh wrote at the time. Brands utilizing Facebook to yak about the Super Bowl saw 99.7 percent higher engagement on Super Bowl Sunday and 60 percent higher engagement during the preceding six weeks.

On Twitter, there were 13.7 million tweets during last year’s game, helping to make the Super Bowl one of the biggest events of the year on the social network. During the final three minutes of last year’s game, there were 10K tweets per second, which set a “TPS” record at the time for a major sporting event. Naturally, Twitter penned a blog post this week discussing all the opportunities for people using the service during the big game.

As to what brands are up to this year? Bud Light is launching two new apps offering fans new ways to “connect with the brand across social platforms,” partnering with Blippar to create an interactive Super Bowl experience by downloading a free app to “blipp” any Bud Light NFL logo on bottles, cans or in print. [More on that here.] And it will also have an app on its Facebook page called the Mojometer to track the number of times fans tag Facebook posts and tweets, if anyone really cares about that.

Samsung has launched a pre-game web campaign featuring Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and Bob Odenkirk to try to drum up interest, for example. Livefyre is offering a Super Bowl NewsHub, which lets people chime in and chat with other fans in realtime, as do a million others. BlackBerry 10 will be featured in Super Bowl XLVII for the first time ever as part of a broad marketing campaign for the re-invented RIM, I mean BlackBerry. SponsorHub also whipped up an infographic on which Harbaugh brother is more marketable, which is obviously something you need to know the answer to immediately.

All of this spending on Super Bowl-related advertising does seem a little bit ridiculous, especially considering how much brands are spending on TV spots. Adobe, for one, is taking a more “contentious” stance in favor of the digital approach with a new web video ad that features a monkey in conversation with a horse (what else?). The ad is, of course, meant to spoof the huge spending on Super Bowl TV ads. On the other front, CivicScience details why Coke’s new digital ad campaign for the Super Bowl is actually working. Which is a good thing, too, as the company is spending big bucks promoting the campaign, (which is called “CokeChase,” by the way.)

As a side note for the geeks, Entrepreneur Magazine’s entrepreneur of the year, Lady Ada (a.k.a. Limor Fried or Adafruit), has posted Becky Stern’s video of how to emblazon your team’s logo in electro-luminescent panel on the side of the nearest football helmet. [Check it out here.] Oh, and there’s Statmilk for fans, diehards and fairweather alike, to use as a game-time companion, in which they can segment data for player and team insight, get predictive analysis and trash talk.

But the other notable tech-related Super Bowl news, which is a little bit different this year, comes from gambling. As The Raw Story pointed out today, an enormous secondary gambling market has (perhaps unsurprisingly) grown around the Super Bowl. The Raw Story reports:

By the half-time show of the 2013 Super Bowl game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers, Americans will have gambled an estimated $10 billion on various aspects of the sports spectacle – from picking the winner to whether Alicia Keys will flub the words of the national anthem.

Naturally, with shrinking budgets and struggling economies, states want a piece of the action. But the Obama Administration isn’t having any of it, and wants to block the states from trying to collect their share of the gambling spend. Nonetheless, there’s no doubt that the burgeoning world of online (and social) gambling has contributed to the overall growth. The Super Bowl has always been one of the most-wagered-on events of the year, but $10 billion? Holy jackpot, Batman, that’s huge!

To this point, some gamblers may be frustrated by my revealing their ace-in-the-hole, but it seems that stats guru/shaman Nate Silver posted his prediction for which team will be victorious in Super Bowl XLVII this week. Predicting the outcome of the Super Bowl is a leeeettle bit different than predicting the presidential elections, but Silver nailed those predictions with such accuracy (and aplomb/grace in the face of the haters), that it’s hard not to a) suspect that he could be a witch and b) want to put down your month’s paycheck on Silver’s prediction — or at least 1 million of your nearest Bitcoins.

And 49ers fans rejoice, because Silver has picked your team to win. That’s right. Suck on that, Ravens fans. Of course, if Silver is wrong, there could be a lot of angry, broke bettors at his door tomorrow night. So hopefully he’s already hired a few bodyguards. [More in his post here.]

Oh, and not that they’ll probably hold a candle to Silver, but here is CBS Insights for a breakdown on demographics and all that other Super Bowl segmentation and what not.


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