Tech ads for the 2018 Super Bowl
Today is a great day for two, usually incompletely connected groups of people – sports fans and fans of advertising. At 6:30 p.m. Eastern time, on U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis will kick off the 52nd Super Bowl finale. Millions of American football fans will be following the championship battle between the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles, and millions of marketing fans are looking forward to ad blocks during the event. The cost of broadcasting a 30-second spot is approx. 5 million dollars, and the reach of such advertising can reach on average 100 million viewers.
With more and more technology in our lives, it's no surprise that clips made specifically for the Super Bowl are increasingly being created by tech giants. Surprisingly, this year we will not see any commercials prepared by Google or GoDaddy – a company that has made a name for itself on controversial videos. And what we'll see?
Sprint in the clip „Do the math and switch to Sprint”
Sprint is one of the largest mobile networks in the United States. This year, it set its sights on a comparison to one of its competitors – the Verizon network. In the clip we can see a laboratory a'la Westworld and robots making fun of their creator.
Sprint's competitors, Verizon and T-mobile, are also set to show their ads during the Big Game, but for now we don't know more details.
Wix.com with YouTube stars
Wix.com o a popular service that allows users to quickly and easily prepare Web pages. Wix’a commercials often appear on the Super Bowl. This year, the company invited the famous comedian and youtuber couple Rhett to collaborate & Link or as they call themselves „Internetainers” (the word they created was formed by combining the words internet and entertainment).
Amazon with an ad for Alexa with a super cast
A dozen or so days before the Super Bowl Amazon released a teaser of its video in which Alexa loses her voice. The full ad will show how the company is tackling this problem. Apart from Alexa, the clip features Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the richest man on Earth, sensational actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey, actress Rebel Wilson and American rapper Cardi B. Enjoy!
Interestingly, this commercial won't wake up Amazon's millions of assistants in U.S. homes, even though the keyword Alexa falls 10 times during it. The problem of uncontrolled switching on of Echo by e.g. ads Amazon has been considering for some time. In September 2014, the company filed a patent describing two techniques to prevent Alexa from waking up. The first involves sending a snippet of an ad to the Echo before it is played to the public. Then Echo compares the command given, to receiving a sample, to determine if it should respond to it. The second method determines how the advertisement itself could send relevant information to Echo informing the assistant not to switch on.
We saw the use of the first technique by Google Assistant, a competitor to Amazon Echo, with a guerrilla Burger King commercial in which a voiceover called up the Assistant to tell it about a new Whooper. After a few days, Google blocked the voice from advertising in Google Home devices so that the user could not activate them.
And Amazon with an ad for a new Prime Video production
The popularity of streaming services continues to grow. There are also many titles being developed specifically for the web. And just „Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” is a film prepared specifically for the Amazon Prime Video service.
Squarespace with Keanu Reeves
Squarespace is another service that makes it easy to make a website. The main and only character in the clip is Keanu Reeves, who recently opened his own company and manufactures motorcycles (seriously -> archmotorcycle.com) and used Squarespace to create a website for it.
Groupon and local patriotism
Groupon, a well-known and popular group buying site in Poland, returns to the Super Bowl for the first time since 2011. In the clip, Tiffany Haddish, an American comedic actress, will encourage people to support local businesses by shopping on Groupon.
I have a feeling that this year there are less innovative campaigns using new technologies and original ideas. Last year we had the first live Super Bowl commercial, or chip wrappers with NFC tags (you can see last year's most interesting Super Bowl tech ads HERE). There's also a lack of ads from the big players – where's Google, where's Microsoft, where's Apple?
On the other hand, everything before us, some ads are kept secret until the very end. As soon as something interesting comes up I will update this text and let you know.
