Each year for the Superbowl, the media tries to convince us this will be biggest and best game of the year, only to leave us disappointed more often than not.  This year I decided to take things into my own hands and find something to engage me for the 3+ hours.  Like most of you I wasn't too interested in either team, having watched my favorite team be eliminated weeks ago.  So of course I had to go to my backup plan of watching to see which Superbowl ad would be my favorite.  To make it a little more interesting I decided to pay close attention to which ads were leveraging mobile components.  If this truly is the year of mobile for Superbowl advertising, then surely we would see an increase over last year's numbers.  I am happy to report that things are definitely looking up for mobile in 2009. The Usual Suspects First and foremost, I suspected most of the major wireless carriers to have placements during the game.  So it was no surprise to see Sprint, which partners with the NFL, Verizon and Nextel each trying to sway customers to their unique offerings.  Not too much in the way of new and exciting, these ads did the job of getting the names out there to help build further brand awareness. Next up I figured I would probably see a few commercials urging viewers to opt-in to text message campaigns or services.  More than last year, 2009 saw several spots like this, including monster.com's "Director of Fandemonium" and the MVP vote sponsored by Cadillac at the end of the game. In addition to these there were several others that that ran mobile marketing campaigns outside of actual television ads.  In this group were Burger King, Emerald Nuts, Anheuser-Busch, Degree, Johnsonville Sausage and Sprint.   As it turns out I had signed up for the Anheuser-Busch campaign via the new site we launched for Tampabay.com.  What was nice about this was that it encouraged me to watch their commercials and then directed me to a mobile site to vote for my favorite one (which I thought were among the best anyway.)  With the plethora of advertisers above it definitely seems that both the awareness and complexity of these channels are increasing. I definitely see these services continuing to grow in the months to come. The Next Mobile Experience With my preconceived notions about how mobile advertising would work its way into TV commercials already met, I wanted to see what other sort of ways mobile could be integrated into an ad for our viewing entertainment, while still being relevant to our everyday lives.  Specifically I wanted to see if any advertisers would actually try and tap into the mindset of a mobile user and reinforce the innate urge to pull out our phone when presented with a question, or problem.

Thankfully, this was filled very nicely by the cars.com ad.  Clearly comical in nature, the "user" David Abernathy was confident about everything in life, except for one thing, his ability to find a good car.  So what does David do?  He pulls out his mobile device and navigates to the cars.com mobile site.  I mention this not only because they are a client of ours, but because I think this it is the best example to date of showing the public of how they can use their mobile device to obtain specific information on-demand.  What better example of how mobile advertising can be used in conjunction with other advertising medium to create a instant response, and the ultimate benefit of mobile. Conclusion All in all this year's Superbowl was a very successful event for mobile advertising (not to mention the game wasn't too bad either.)  Viewers were engaged in new and more meaningful ways and I was really surprised by how many different ways in which mobile was used to further this goal.  Moving away from the passive advertising of years past, mobile is on the forefront of a new more active method of involving consumers, one in which they have more agency over how, when, and what they interact with.  This is something we should embrace and foster, as it matures into its own advertising experience.  I am excited to see where this leads us and expect other new channels for engaging consumers to emerge in the near future.