First off, GREAT game! I tried to keep track of the commercials that featured a mobile component. Here’s what I caught during the game.
1. Approx 6pm EST: SPRINT re-ran its not-so-new NFL mobile campaign in which users viewed a call-to-action to TXT a keyword to Sprint’s 77777 shortcode for more information.
2. Approx 7:20pm EST: Cars.com showed a man in his car viewing the company’s website on his “smartphone” before walking into a car dealership to negotiate for a new car (at least it was implied). While no call-to-action to visit the mobile site and/or text message was displayed, I found it refreshing the commercial creators chose to display the interaction with the website via mobile handset.
3. Approx 7:43pm EST: Monster.com encouraged users to enter a contest by texting “Fan” to 24421. Users received an SMS with an embedded link in it taking them to mobile internet page where users could provide information to to join in on the fun. I must admit that the mobile internet page was pretty well designed.
4. Approx 7:44pm EST: United Way asked users to text “Fit” to their shortcode – I have to be honest I missed the shortcode because the call-to-action text came and went WAY TOO FAST. I can’t imagine that too many people were quick enough with their mobiles to interact with this ad.
5. Approx 9:28pm EST: The NFL encouraged viewers to vote for their game MVP choice via NFL.com on their PC or web-enabled mobile device. NOTE the call-to-action was verbal – NO text display.
6. Approx 9:35PM EST: - NFL re-ran SAME add as above.
7. Approx a few minutes after the game ended: NFLShop.com encouraged viewers to call 1-866.NFL.5959 to pick up some Pittsburgh Steelers gear. To its credit, the commercial did show the complete numeric number above the mnemonic version in the initial scene, but then only showed the mnemonic version through the majority of the ad. I wrote about this last month – the use of letters to represent numbers prevents mobile users with QWERTY keyboards from dialing or texting the correct numbers.
8. Approx a few minutes later: NFLShop.com re-ran the same ad, but I could have sworn that I did not even see the complete numeric phone number this time only the version with the mnemonic for NFL (1.866.NFL.5959).
So there it is, certainly not a lot, but then again Super Bowl advertising has always been more about building branding awareness versus asking for a direct response. We’ll certainly see more next year.