Did they get it right?
For most social media skeptics out there (see everybody not peddling social media like it’s the next incarnation of the television), there’s an enormously growing amount of speculation that Twitter isn’t the social tool that social media folks say it’s going to be. I would lump myself into said category, as well. And while the Brand Bowl 2010 is a really nice concept, both for a show of technology and agency prowess, I think it’s the wrong metric and the wrong thing to show expertise in.
Brand Bowl 2010
Let me explain. Everybody who’s anybody is angling for the next best thing in the ad business. Whether it be one of the various and sundry social applications on the web, say twitter, yelp, ning, digg, delicious, etc, etc, etc, brands can’t afford to be the farm on just one of these. Because, in truth, the social media application doesn’t matter if it doesn’t hit the target audience well. So, let’s use the “results” from Brand Bowl as an example. The Focus on the Family spot, which was quite possibly the most controversial and tame spot in Super Bowl memory, got lots of love in the Twittersphere. Why? It was both controversial AND it bore the exact subject matter that people oft tweet about: politics, religion and controversy. So, naturally, it would grade high on that scale. However, that does nothing to monitor effectiveness, strength of message or any other necessary metric to determine ROI on a Super Bowl spot.
All that’s really to say is that I truly believe anybody still putting Twitter in any sort of elevated status in the social media sphere has it all wrong. Most people who work in brand building in any sort don’t believe it has much longer of a shelf life in terms of the overall brand discussion. It faded quicker than MySpace and most younger consumers are onto something else. I wouldn’t have used it to measure effectiveness of anything. But that’s me.
