Facebook Inc Enters Super Bowl Ad Sales Race Against Twitter Inc

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It is just four days until the biggest and most watched football game of the year.  Hosted in Arizona, the Seattle Seahawks will take on the New England Patriots.  These are two extremely competitive and well-matched teams that will look to take home the Lombardi Trophy at the end of Sunday’s game.  All last week and this week, Super Bowl media coverage has overwhelmingly focused on “deflategate”, in which 11 of the 12 game balls provided by the Patriots during the AFC Championship game were underinflated.  The NFL is continuing its investigation, but the blame right now appears to be on a Patriots attendant.  While this whole investigation mess means nothing for the big game, two other rivals will be duking it out on Sunday to sell ad space and attempting to take a slice of the $66 million TV ad bonanza.

Facebook Inc Enters Super Bowl Ad Sales Race Against Twitter Inc

Real Time Ads: Facebook Takes on Twitter

Facebook has announced they will be selling video ads on its social networking page during the Super Bowl, which will be triggered by key words that users use about the game.  While users are more unlikely to be at their computers during the game, tablets and mobile phones provide a new opportunity for advertisers to further target a new audience. While Facebook did deploy an advertising campaign last year based on users “likes”, demographics, location, etc, the social networking site will now use real time ads to further attract advertising revenue.

However, Twitter has been the undisputed leader of the Super Bowl real time online ads for the past several years.  The concept really look off during the San Francisco 49ers-Baltimore Ravens Super Bowl, in which the infamous light outage delayed the game for some time.  Mondelez International took to social media to poke fun at the outage, while “advertising” its Oreo cookie products.  Since then a whole new level and advertising platform has taken off.  Toyota is another company that has used social networking platforms in addition to its TV ads to target potential customers during the big game. Toyota has announced that it will be making video ads specifically for social media, helping fuel a new advertising revolution.

Twitter’s “War Room” Of Big Advertising Clients

Twitter has already announced that they have tripled the number of big corporate advertising clients for the Super Bowl to 13.  Included are PepsiCo and Anheuser Busch, two Super Bowl ad staples that appear on a yearly basis. Additionally, Twitter executives have said that there are some other big corporate clients who are interested in potentially placing “unplanned” ads on its social media site during the game.

All in all, social media advertising during the Super Bowl may be a huge revenue growth for social networking companies due to the fact that a 30 second TV ad is currently going for $4.5 million, on top of the $5-10 million it costs just to produce the TV ad.  While advertising on social media is not a significantly cheaper option, there certainly are some savings compared to TV ads and this is the phenomenon that Twitter and Facebook are battling and banking on for this Super Bowl and years to come.

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