Super Bowl XLV was the most-watched program in television history, with 162.9 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Company.
All of those viewers leads to incredible media attention and synergy.
It's not just a football game. It's a national and international event, with weeks of publicity and media coverage.
There isn't just coverage of the players from both teams. There's an entire media day devoted to coaches and assistant coaches.
The musicians doing the half-time show get coverage, as do the rock stars, actors and others doing pre-game shows and red carpet appearances. This year, celebrity chef Guy Fieri spent a lot of time on air showing the world how to make appetizers and desserts out of Ritz crackers.
And the ads during the Super Bowl sometimes make more news, it feels like, than the game itself.
- You have just about every type of public relations in full swing -- sports PR, entertainment PR and corporate PR -- and working in synergy with the actual show and the advertisements.
- Players and their agents want to maximize coverage, especially for those who'll be free agents and aren't as well known as the quarterbacks and superstars.
- Assistant coaches from Super Bowl teams typically get hired away, in large part from the attention and spotlight they receive.
- Musical acts and celebrities get a bump in free publicity and exposure -- or bad PR, if they mess up the lyrics to the national anthem, as Christina Aguilera did.
Yet the most interesting thing to look at is how Super Bowl commercials have become far less important for the actual time they are on screen and far more important in terms of earned media in the press and viral hits on Youtube.
It used to be that Super Bowl commercials were simply expensive, because you reached at big audience.
This year in particular, two commercials stand out in how the companies leveraged however much they spent on the actual ads and multiplied that by getting incredible earned media in the press and millions upon millions of hits on Youtube, in one case before the commercial even ran during the Super Bowl.
The VW commercial with the little kid in the Darth Vader costume was viewed millions of times on Youtube before the Packers and Steelers even took the field.
It's a simple ad with zero dialogue and no voiceover. A little kid in a Darth Vader costume tries to use the force to move his dog, a doll and other household objects, then getting shocked when the force works to start his father's Passat -- because his father is in the kitchen, pushing the remote engine start button. You can see it here.
The ad is funny, cute and watchable more than once, especially since the Super Bowl version is only 30 seconds and the full ad on Youtube is 60 seconds long and much better.
The other commercial that generated press coverage and viral buzz is also quite different than the usual Doritos and Budweiser spots you see during the Super Bowl.
It's from Chrysler. We're all used to seeing ads on TV with a car zooming around a twisty mountain road for 30 seconds while an announcer tells us about torsion bars or some such thing.
This ad quite different. It's two minutes long, an eternity for a Super Bowl ad or a viral Youtube video, and it's not glamorous at all. It shows Detroit as gritty and tough, and it's written -- and shot -- more like a short movie than a TV commercial.
The ad's message is also startlingly different. It doesn't brag about the car and tell you gas mileage or horsepower. It's almost a political, patriotic message -- but it's more powerful for leaving that as subtext instead of saying outright, "Buy American."
Here's the text of the ad, starting with the narrator:
I got a question for ya. What does this city know about luxury, huh? What does a town that's been to hell and back know about the finer things in life? Well I'll tell ya. More than most.
You see, it's the hottest fires that make the toughest steel. Add hard work and conviction, and the know-how that runs generations deep in every last one of us. That's who we are. That's our story. Now it's probably not the one you've been reading in papers, the one being written by folks who've never even been here, who don't know what we're capable of.
Because when it comes to luxury, it's as much about where it's from as who it's for. Now we're from America, but this isn't New York City, or the Windy City, or Sin City, and we're certainly no one's Emerald City.
Toward the end of the ad, Detroit rapper Enimem is subtle and understated as he drives a new Chrysler 200 to a theater with a gospel choir and the background music to Lose Yourself, the song from his autobiographical movie 8 Mile about going from rags to riches in Detroit.
The narrator stops speaking while Eninem approaches the choir, and his only line is: "This is the Motor City, and this is what we do."
Then text comes on the screen ending with Chrysler's new tagline: Imported from Detroit.
Here's the ad on Youtube, where it had more than 4 million hits a couple of days after the Super Bowl.
It received instant buzz and incredible earned media. I did a google news and found 745 stories, with more stories and blog posts popping up even now.
This is maybe the best viral ad I've ever seen. It's not cute or funny. It's made some people cry, and it shows the power of storytelling over special effects, how a unique message and approach can leverage a TV commercial and receive far more publicity, earned media and viral viewership than the ad itself. That's the power of synergy and storytelling.