During last night’s game, The Center for Sales Strategy invited people to provide live commentary about the commercials of Super Bowl 45 via Twitter. The result? A shared conversation about real-time events among 183 participants, who exchanged 1, 131 comments.
The leading contributor was Suzanne Pepper from the Palm Beach Post (98 tweets), followed by Ad Bowl coordinator Kim Peek (79 tweets), and Gregory Smith from the Austin American-Statesman (71 tweets).
So how was the Ad Bowl promoted? In addition to inviting our clients through The Sales Edge, Facebook and Twitter, we asked them to invite their friends and customers to participate. Plus, we added a charitable twist by involving the Taylor’s Gift foundation. (For every tweet, The Center for Sales Strategy contributed a dollar to Taylor’s Gift, to a maximum of $1,000; we hit that mark before the game was over.)
Todd Storch, the founder and president at Taylor’s Gift, quickly followed-up with this note: “Thank you to everyone that participated from across the country in the CSS Ad Bowl! Your efforts help us continue our mission to Regift Life, Renew Health and Restore Families. All of us at TGF are dedicated to increasing organ donation registrations across the country and invite you to take 90 seconds to register and double check that you are in your state's official registry at www.TaylorsGift.org.”
So who won the CSS Ad Bowl? Marketing aficionados won because they conversed with like minds during the event, and learned from each other. Taylor’s Gift won because we helped them raise both money and awareness. And CSS won, because we engaged our clients and others in the learning opportunity that was Super Bowl 45. Our goal was to create a setting where clients and others could share their thoughts and knowledge about a very high-stakes marketing event… and that mission was accomplished.
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Mike Anderson is VP Consumer Insights and Communication at The Center for Sales Strategy, Inc.
