The Super Bowl Ad Disconnect

We promise this will be the last post on the Super Bowl (most likely). The ads, of course, have received plenty of attention, from the sky-high cost to the post-game rankings. What's interesting if you think back to it (or go back and view them again as I did), is how few companies used the Web to their advantage. According to the MediaPost story, while 84% of ads included a URL, only 26% of the ads (including the dot-coms) featured any sort of call-to-action.

There's plenty of lip-service paid to the power of the Internet in regard to advertising, but there seemed to be a disconnect here. Sure, you can see the ads again on MySpace or Hulu, but most of the companies did not run deeply integrated campaigns which used the Web to provide added value. This sentence from the story sums it up: "And while almost half of all 2008 Super Bowl advertisers had an official YouTube page or social networking profile--not one of them made mention of their presence in the TV spot."