Super Bowl Sunday: Why did TV advertisers neglect digital?

With ad budgets stretched and creativity exhausted it seems like marketers dropped the ball on this year’s Super Bowl bonanza – with new research highlighting that many brands failed to integrate their campaigns with their online and mobile presence.

Cross-screen advertising and real time TV-ad tracking company, wywy, studied 56 different US TV commercials during Sunday’s broadcast. The company noted that less than half (45%) showed a clearly visible reference to the advertised product on the homepage of its website, with only 38% of advertisers prominently displaying the product on the mobile version of the homepage.

However most advertisers connected their TV advertising with a cross-screen social media experience through hashtags to encourage trending of their ads on Twitter – almost half (48%) secured the appropriate hashtags to ensure accurate and seamless social media experiences.

“Many brands invested a significant portion of their annual marketing budgets on TV advertising during yesterday’s game to reach the more than 100 million viewers with their message – yet the study suggests that they are still falling short on the basic marketing channels such as search and their own website,” said Andreas Schroeter, wywy’s co-founder.

TV-inspired viewers searching for the advertised product or visiting the website in one out of two cases didn¹t find what they were looking for and recent research found that 78% of all screen time for consumers currently involves simultaneous use of a second screen device during the commercial break.

With so many Super Bowl advertisers failing to connect screens for seamless storytelling, the advertisers “really dropped the ball” on the opportunity to reinforce their message and drive better consumer engagement, argues wywy.