The year 2008 brings the Superbowl commercials of about 40 advertisers, running about 60 ads (Anheuser Busch has booked 10 slots and several others have more than one). During the three to four hour spectacle on Sunday February 3rd the ads will play to an estimated 90 to 100 million viewers on the upcoming Superbowl Sunday game day. And here are some shocking numbers – And at least another 100 million views were recorded on Super Bowl commercial video archive sites at AOL, YouTube, CBS, MySpace and other game day commercial video archives online. Those are some startling numbers for any advertiser, and may make those premium prices worthwhile.

With Superbowl ads costing upwards of 3 million dollars per 30 second spot this year at Fox, advertisers are getting a massive exposure beyond those fleeting moments on live television. Those Superbowl commercials were also saved amongst multiple additional TV commercial specialty sites, with unknown audience size and imprecise tallies of video views.

Looking at marketing smarts (or lack thereof) both AOL and YouTube have put up redirects on their 2007 Superbowl pages which take viewers to the new 2008 commercials pages, while CBS shows a limp “Download the latest players” notice, asking viewers to download either Windows Media Player or RealPlayer to view the commercials from last year. MySpace 2007 SuperSpots page, with 43,400 “Friends” has a floating javascript badge which encourages visitors to click through to the 2008 SuperBowlAds page.

The Wall Street Journal today covered the expansion of TV ads to the online venue in an article titled, “The Super Bowl Blitz Expands in Online Arena” and that story included the following quote:

The different online venues often attract a sizable audience. Last year, the Super Bowl ad poll on YouTube drew more than 28 million online viewers and 167,000 votes for the best Super Bowl commercial, Google said. AOL says its videos of the TV ads were watched more than 40 million times last year. This compares with the roughly 90 million viewers who tuned into the big game on TV in 2007.

Google has now launched its “Adblitz” section dedicated to the 2008 Super Bowl commercials.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nXR7aq3KAE]

But MySpace has also (a bit more quietly) rolled out its version of the SuperBowl Ads Commercials archive. Today also saw the updating of their Superbowl Countdown Widget to include the logos of the Patriots and the Giants on the properly colored helmets of the two teams playing on Sunday. (They had previously rotated the official colors of all NFL teams.)

http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=Super Bowl XLII Countdown.sbw

I hear that this magic widget will flip over a couple of days after this years game to properly countdown to Superbowl 43, scheduled for February 1st 2009! (363 days 23hour 59 minutes…)

In other developments in this space, controversial advertiser GoDaddy.com has also marketed for much of the year with PPC ads which turn up on Search Engine results pages (SERPS) each time someone searches for “Commercials” or “Superbowl Ads” in regular searches.

Clicking on those Adwords ads takes you to the GoDaddy Commercials Archive, where you can see all their banned (and unapproved, er rejected ads from this year and previous years). Today there have been a couple of new PPC ads showing up for other TV Commercial sites, including a site called FireBrand which apparently has a cable program (ION TV) showing the best of television commercials as a regular show which, based on the site, looks as though they do a bit of commentary and just show great commercials. That’s some business model there. All ads all the time – I wonder how you distinguish between the show and the actual commercials?

PS: They are obviously astute marketers as they originally grabbed my attention by making a comment on my blog in a previous post. 😉 Interesting site guys.