Each year within the Super Bowl, Madison Avenue plays an Ad Bowl, as marketers spend large amounts of time and treasure to create commercials that will, they hope, win plaudits and move merchandise. And within each Ad Bowl, two categories of consumer products usually account for a supersize amount of spots: automobiles and beverages.
Super Bowl XLVII, to be broadcast on Feb. 3 on CBS, is no exception. At this point, as sponsors continue to share their plans for the game, it looks as if six automakers — the Chrysler Group, Ford Motor, the Hyundai Motor Group, Mercedes-Benz USA, Toyota Motor and Volkswagen of America — will advertise eight brands in the game, including Audi, Hyundai, Kia, Lincoln and Volkswagen. (Cars.com, an auto-shopping site, will also advertise.)
It also appears that six marketers — Anheuser-Busch InBev, Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, the Milk Processor Education Program, PepsiCo and SodaStream International — will advertise eight beverages, including two new beers, Budweiser Black Crown and Beck’s Sapphire, and three colas, Coke, Pepsi-Cola and Pepsi Next.
The Super Bowl is typically the most-watched television show each year. It is, commensurately, typically the most expensive ad vehicle each year. For the coming game, CBS charged an estimated $3.7 million to $3.8 million for each 30 seconds of commercial time. As eye-popping as those prices are, all the commercial time in the game has been sold out for at least two weeks.
The Super Bowl offers marketers “spectacle, huge numbers and an environment in which more people are engaged in the advertising,” said Steve Shannon, vice president for marketing at the Hyundai Motor America unit of the Hyundai Motor Group, which is buying two commercials in the game.
This will be the sixth consecutive Super Bowl with spots for the Hyundai brand. “A lot of us are there,” Mr. Shannon said of the automakers, because “it sells cars.”
For instance, the two models that Hyundai Motor America advertised during the 2012 Super Bowl — the Genesis coupe R-Spec and the Veloster Turbo — “have the shortest-day supply of any of our vehicles,” Mr. Shannon said, referring to a widely-followed measure of automotive demand.
The Super Bowl is also a draw for auto brands because “we can get the year off to a good start,” he added. “In the automotive business, you don’t want to dig yourself a hole early in the year and have to dig out.”
Mr. Shannon spoke during a visit to New York on Tuesday to give reporters previews of the Hyundai Super Bowl XLVII commercials. The humorous spots, created by Innocean USA, will promote the new seven-passenger Hyundai Santa Fe, in the first quarter, and the Hyundai Sonata Turbo, in the second.
To take advantage of the increasing willingness of consumers to watch Super Bowl ads before the game in social media like Facebook and share them with friends, the Hyundai commercials will be released before the game, Mr. Shannon said; each is to run 45 seconds, 15 seconds longer than its in-game counterpart.
The Super Bowl is “now a social media extravaganza,” he said. “The traffic it drives to automotive Web sites and our own HyundaiUSA.com is, without question, giant.”
A beverage giant that joined Hyundai Motor America in describing ad plans to reporters on Tuesday, the Coca-Cola Company, is also making social media an intrinsic part of its Super Bowl strategy.
“We want to have a sustained conversation with consumers year-round,” said Pio Schunker, senior vice president for integrated marketing communications at the Coca-Cola North America division of Coca-Cola, and “the scale and size of the Super Bowl” will help “kick-start a really big conversation.”
The Facebook page for Coca-Cola is already offering fans a preview of a 60-second Coke commercial, by Wieden & Kennedy, that will run in the first half of the game. Other social media, like Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube, will be enlisted in promoting the commercial. It offers viewers a chance to vote for one of three thirsty teams — cowboys, showgirls or “badlanders” (motorcycle toughs) — to win a fanciful “Coke Chase” across a desert.
The winning team is to be revealed in a 30-second commercial to run immediately after the Super Bowl, Mr. Schunker said. After that, the first 50,000 people who took part in the campaign and logged onto, or signed up for, the My Coke Rewards Web site will win coupons for free 20-ounce bottles of Coke, Coke Zero or Diet Coke, he said.
The campaign, backed by what Mr. Schunker called an extensive “social plan,” will continue throughout 2013, he said. It will be part of a three-year initiative to refocus on “those fundamentals that need to anchor our ‘Open Happiness’ umbrella campaign” for the Coke brand, he said.
“We have to get back to the love of the liquid,” he added. The “Coke Chase” campaign is concentrated on refreshing, thirst-quenching qualities, he said.
For instance, if the Super Bowl effort “does really well,” Mr. Schunker said, “we might come back with the game on ‘American Idol,’ ” which Coca-Cola sponsors, asking viewers to vote for a winning team. The winner could be a different team from the one that wins the vote before and during the Super Bowl, he added.
