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.

If you’re watching the Super Bowl today, some of those brand new ads may feel awfully familiar — a growing number of them are being released online ahead of time, either in their entirety or as a partial teaser.

A spokesperson for video advertising and analytics company Visible Measures, told me that his team looked at every Super Bowl campaign since 2010 and found that more and more advertisers are following this strategy — there were 13 in 2010, 27 in 2011, 34 in 2012, and 42 in last year. (Visible Measures found 30 brands that had their ads ahead of time this year, but that was in the middle of the past week, so the final number will be higher.)

Basically, it seems that advertisers now treat the game as just part of a monthlong campaign, one where online views are increasingly important. As Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, told The New Yorker: “It is not about winning the Super Bowl but winning an entire month.”

Super Bowl ads saw a total of 370 million online views last year, Visible Measures said (measured one month after the game). And advertisers who release the ads early are the ones who win, according to the company’s data.

Visible Measures says it tracks a video’s “True Reach” across the web, including sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, and Vimeo. When the brands released their ads ahead of time, they saw significantly higher True Reach than those that didn’t — the difference peaked at 600 percent more views in 2012 before falling to 200 percent last year, presumably due to increased competition for online attention.

As one example, Visible Measures pointed to Samsung’s video “The Big Pitch,” which had already been viewed 8.7 million times by the time the Super Bowl aired, and which had a total of 33.5 million online views a month later. And this year, Budweiser’s “Puppy Love” ad (embedded below) has already been viewed 26.7 million times — so its final viewer count is going to pretty impressive.

On Sunday night, about 110 million people turned on their TVs to watch a series of lavish, expensively produced 30-second skits interspersed with live footage of men throwing a ball around. Fox Sports charged up to $4.5 million for each ad spot this year, with companies like Anheuser-Busch, Chevrolet, and Pepsi coughing the record-breaking figure.

But one of the most notable ads was created by a 15-person tech startup called GoldieBlox, which makes engineering toys for little girls. The San Francisco-based company announced four days ago that it won Intuit’s Small Business, Big Game challenge, landing one of the year’s most coveted advertising spots.

(GoldieBlox’s Super Bowl ad also helps distract from its legal battle with the Beastie Boys, who are suing the company for using an unauthorized parody of “Girls.” The Super Bowl ad played a cover of “Cum Feel The Noize” by Slade that was, presumably, licensed and paid for.)

It’s extremely unusual for such a small company to advertise during the Super Bowl, but what makes GoldieBlox’s spot, which features a hoard of little girls turning their boring pink toys into a rocket and launching it into space, especially interesting is that it serves as an antidote to the outrageous sexism constantly on display in each Super Bowl’s commercials. Of course, it also gives Intuit a chance to boost its image without having to figure out how to make a commercial about tax software interesting.

The misogyny in Super Bowl is so egregious that advocacy group The Representation Project actually made an app to help viewers send complaints directly to the companies responsible.

It’s still too early to tell which ads will make this year’s list of the worst offenders, but based on Twitter reactions, SodaStream and Volkswagen are in the running to earn that dubious distinction. Here’s a list of last year’s creepiest spots, including Carl’s Jr’s desperate attempt to make fish sandwiches sexy.

But the tide may be turning as the gap between male and female Super Bowl viewers narrows each year. For example, GoDaddy.com, one of last year’s top offenders, dramatically changed its tone with this year’s commercial. Hopefully more companies will figure out how to make attention-grabbing ads without resorting to crass stereotypes.

Good news for cord-cutters: NBCUniversal has said it will offer an 11-hour free digital video stream of this year’s Super Bowl, including pre-game coverage, the halftime show, and even an episode of “The Blacklist” following the big game. The stream, which will be offered for free, will begin at noon on February 1st and then wrap up at 10 PM ET that evening.

However, NBC doesn’t have the rights to live-stream on smartphone devices – which the NFL has given exclusively to Verizon Wireless – NBC’s “Super Stream Sunday” event will only be available on desktop computers and tablets.

The content will be made available to viewers via NBC Sports Live Extra, and the Sports Live Extra app for tablets as well as via the web. Sites including NFL.com and SuperBowl.com will also point to the stream. Most importantly, viewers will be able to watch the stream for free without the usual step of having to login and authenticate with their pay TV subscription credentials.

According to NBC execs, the plan is to use the Super Bowl event and all the eyeballs it brings to promote the industry-wide effort called “TV Everywhere,” and NBC’s own TV Everywhere offerings. NBC last month had announced its plans to further develop and expand its TV Everywhere-powered streams in 2015, which began with 24/7 live streaming of content from NBC-owned stations.

The network owns stations in major markets, including New York, LA, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Francisco, Washington D.C., and Miami-Fort Lauderdale. However, NBC said at the time it would be onboarding new NBC affiliates as soon as possible, which would make the network’s content available for streaming to more users throughout the U.S. this year.

During the Super Bowl stream, NBC will advertise its TV Everywhere services, explaining to viewers after The Blacklist airs how easy it is to authenticate in order to view other content in the future.

“We are leveraging the massive digital reach of the Super Bowl to help raise overall awareness of TV Everywhere by allowing consumers to explore our vast TVE offering with this special one-day-only access,” said Alison Moore, g.m. and exec VP of TV Everywhere for NBCU in a release.

NBC Sports Live Extra was the first product to ever live stream a Super Bowl game when it offered the Super Bowl XLVI stream to viewers on February 5, 2012, NBC also notes when announcing this news. The move to live stream the Super Bowl continued afterwards, even when other networks like CBS and FOX scored rights to air the game over the past couple of years.

This year’s stream event is notable, too, because it marks the first time that NBC has gained the rights to live stream the Super Bowl halftime show, which is set to include performances by Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz.

In addition, says Variety, the live stream will include advertisements sold exclusively for digital viewers, combined with some that are airing in the linear TV feed. These ads will also be made available for viewing separately on NBC.com, YouTube and Hulu.

Last year, viewers on YouTube watched more than 6.3 million hours’ worth of Super Bowl ads, said YouTube. The site is now offering a dedicated URL (http://youtube.com/adblitz) for smartphone, tablet and desktop viewers who, over the next month, are interested in checking out all the Super Bowl ad-related entertainment.

Image credit: NBCSports

Did you guys see that Coca Cola Super Bowl commercial?

You know the one. It opens with a weird montage of people who are sad because of the Internet, then segues into a Tron-style data center, where some guy spills Coke on a server. Now, you might think that this would be bad news, but no! Instead of everything breaking down, some puzzling combination of Coca Cola and positive emotions floods everyone’s computer, and everything is great.

To be honest, I’m not sure this is a 100 percent accurate representation of how technology works. Nonetheless, it represents an interesting new social media campaign (which Coca Cola is also promoting on Twitter, natch). As explained on the Make It Happy website, you’re supposed to find negative tweets, then reply to them with the #MakeItHappy hashtag. Coke, in turn, will “respond with a happy piece of art made from their post.”

What does that have to do with Coca Cola? I couldn’t tell ya. Is positivity inherently better than negativity? Not necessarily, in my opinion. And will this actually make the Internet a more positive place? Probably not.

But hey, the art made me smile. Especially after the unrelenting bleakness of all those other Super Bowl commercials.

The 2015 Super Bowl between the Patriots and Seahawks has wrapped, but the scores on how well this year’s advertisements performed are just now rolling in. These coveted time slots reach millions of viewers, and advertisers take advantage by showing some of their best – or, in some cases, most controversial – ads of the year. Adobe this evening has been monitoring the “social buzz” around this year’s Super Bowl ads, and is now calling the winners based on posts and sentiments from viewers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and elsewhere across the social web.

To come up with its Top 10 list of Super Bowl ads, Adobe used Adobe Social, one of the company’s “Marketing Cloud” solutions, in order to analyze over 4 million social media mentions on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Reddit, Foursquare, Google+, WordPress, VK, Disqus, Metacafe, Dailymotion, and other blogs.

The algorithm takes into account a combination of total mentions, Super Bowl buzz growth over an average day, sentiment, spend efficiency, and international reach.

The following ads (see below) produced the highest combined score, with Proctor & Gamble’s “#LikeAGirl” ad snagging the top spot with the highest volume of mentions – over 400,000. P&G also drove the highest positive sentiment across social media mentions, says Adobe, with 84% of mentions focused on feelings like admiration and joy.

In case you missed it, the ad was focused on female empowerment, and is meant to inspire an effort to change the meaning of the phrase “#LikeAGirl” from being an insult into more of a compliment. The overall message involves a problem facing young girls: that confidence plummets during puberty and often never recovers.

It may have helped that the ad was designed for social media buzz, thanks to its hashtagged title, and a call out at the end which said, “Let’s make #LikeAGirl mean amazing things.”

Still, I have to admit it’s nice to see this sort of ad beating out those where the women were objectified to sell products. Progress, right?

Meanwhile, says Adobe, Nissan’s ad saw the largest international reach of the top 10 with more than 55% of its buzz coming from outside the U.S. And Avocados of Mexico saw the highest social buzz growth compared to an average day with an increase of 3,000%.

Adobe also pointed out that it was the “year of the fathers” this year with 3 of the top 10 commercials telling a story around dads.

Here’s the top 10:

1. #LikeAGirl
2. Avocados from Mexico
3. Dove Men Care
4. eSurance
5. Clash of Clans
6. Squarespace
7. Nissan
8. Toyota
9. Loctite
10. Anheuser Busch (Budweiser and Budlight)

And here are the top 10’s ads:

1. P&G’s (Always) “#LikeAGirl”

2. Avocados from Mexico

3. Dove Men Care

4. eSurance

5. Clash of Clans

6. Squarespace

7. Nissan

8. Toyota

9. Locite

10. Anheuser Busch (Budweiser and Budlight)