The contest isn’t over till you’ve watched the game films. When it comes to evaluating the marketing done around the Super Bowl, those replays can yield a wide variety of results.

That’s especially true this year, with buzz marketing becoming an ever-more-accepted tactic for creating brand awareness and association on the Web. That gives analysts more tools with which to judge the hits and misses in a big broadcast event like Super Bowl XLIII—even if those tools sometimes produce results that contradict other measures, such as search impact, or even themselves.

And yet, everyone seems to like the MC Hammer/ emcee McMahon parley by direct response marketer Cash4Gold.com.

Of course, search integration is the grand-daddy—okay, the much older brother—of Super Bowl ad metrics. Reprise Media, now a division of the Interpublic Group, has been doing post-game analysis of the search marketing plays for five years now.

This year’s scorecard found that only about two-thirds of the brands that ran spots during this month’s big game bought pay-per-click search ads against either their brands or their specific products.

While 95% of advertisers were visible on the Web through organic search—that is, showing up naturally on search results pages in Google and Yahoo—only 69% of those advertisers were buying search ads to make sure people found those sites.

That beats the 54% who made solid efforts to make sure searchers could find their content after the 2008 Super Bowl. But it still constitutes a missed marketing opportunity, says Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise. “Advertisers spent $3 million for 30 seconds of air time plus the cost of production,” he says. “There’s an opportunity to extend the life of these assets online through search and social media. I don’t know that people are going to get your message just by watching the spot during the game.”

What’s more, Reprise research found 54% of this year’s viewers were expressing as much interest in the Bowl ads as in the Bowl game, as agency marketing director Anthony Iaffaldano pointed out in a mid-month Webinar.

That’s reflected in the number of places thoseTV spots showed up post-game. This year more than ever before, Super Bowl ads were syndicated around the Web, on YouTube and on USAToday.com but also on Hulu.com and many smaller video aggregator sites. “You’ve got all those commercials out there now, and they exist on a number of Web sites, not just in one place,” Hershberg says. “I’d say that’s one of the biggest changes we’ve seen since we started doing the scorecard in 2005.”

It’s also a good reason marketers should be making sure to direct visitors to their branded site with their message, rather than handing them off to a Web site without branding—or worse, to one where they might watch that Super Bowl spot while taking in a rival’s brand message. Reprise found that 30% of viewers reported that they were more likely to visit the Web site of a company that advertised during the Super Bowl than of the average company behind a random TV spot.

In other words, you’re buying good cred and high engagement with a spot in the big game, so don’t squander them by not following through online.

According to Reprise, the companies that did the best integrated marketing around their Super Bowl spots were predominantly the Web-centric veteran advertisers, including eTrade, CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com, GoDaddy.com and Cash4Gold.com, a first-time Super Bowl entrant. These companies including a clear call to action in their ads, provided value-adds in the form of extra content rewards to visitors who found them on the Web and in social networks, and helped that happen by means of paid search ads.

Only one in five Super Bowl ads built a clear call to action into the video content, Reprise found—anything from a simple listing of the URL to a more explicit statement about what value-added content viewers could find there.

Reprise has only been tracking the use of social media by Super Bowl advertisers for two years, but found that 51% of this year’s marketers did something to link their TV and online campaigns to a community Web channel of some kind: a Facebook page, posting videos to YouTube, posting a Twitter link, and so one.

But while that social activity is heartening, it still seems to be in the experimental phase, siloed off from other online initiatives. Only one quarter of Bowl advertisers set up any links between their social media efforts around the game and any other content they were providing on the Web, Iaffaldano pointed out.

Online trading firm eTrade did a particularly good job of integrating its “eTrade Baby” TV campaign with all the different online channels, Iaffaldano said: a good call to action in the spot, strong social media presence, a long list of pay-per-click keywords across the search engines, and in particular an engaging landing page that rewarded viewers who made the move online to find out more.

The company built buzz weeks before kickoff time with a landing page that included outtakes from the “Baby” series, along with a link to YouTube, to an eTrade Baby Facebook page and an invitation to “Follow me @etradebaby on Twitter.”

Another big winner in Reprise’s eyes was first-time Bowl marketer Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and the job it did presenting a consistent message about its “Plant a Seed” campaign to renovate playing fields across a number of Web channels. The TV spot contained a strong call to action using the most logical, easy to remember URL: www.FrostedFlakes.com. And when viewers did act and go to that site, they were presented right away with a landing page relevant to the commercial that led them there, with an explanation of the “Plant a Seed” program, links to YouTube to see the ad again, other links to social media, and a chance to nominate their own local playground site as a candidate for renewal.

“If someone is interested enough in the commercial to go online and search for your brand, it’s a lot more impactful for that person to see a page that ties in immediately with what they’ve already seen,” Iaffaldano said. “It not only reinforces the original message but it provides them with a ‘bread crumb trail’ that can lead them to the concept that’s most appropriate, in this case the very specific landing page on the Frosted Flakes Web site.”

In other words, if you’ve got them interested enough to turn away from their TV screens, don’t risk losing them with landing-page confusion.

By contrast, says Hershberg , the Doritos brand ran an expensive and buzz-worthy campaign to find another user-generated Super Bowl commercial but then failed to run a paid search campaign helping people find it on the Web.

“That was especially tough because the Doritos commercial was hidden online behind a vanity domain, www.snackstrongproductions.com, which had nothing to do with the brand and no way for people to find it,” Hershberg says.

And some of the brands running ads in the Super Bowl barely got up off the Astroturf in terms of leading viewers smoothly from the TV screen to the monitor screen. Hershberg cites Taco Bell, a handful of entertainment properties and the Denny’s restaurant chain for particularly poor execution.

Denny’s campaign has been touted as a success. The chain offered to give away its signature Galnd Slam breakfast from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. local time at each of its 1,600 restaurants in North America on the Tuesday after the game. The offer was mentioned in two spots during the game and post-game, as well as in a full-page Monday ad in USA Today, in a mention on NBC’s “Today Show”, and in e-mail sent to its “Denny’s Breakfast Club.” The promotion reported drew 2 million diners on February 3.

All well and good. But in terms of online integration, the campaign was a fumble, says Reprise.

“They had no paid search, and their ad had no clear call to action,” Hershberg says. “The bigger issue for them, however, was that they were completely unprepared to have people come to visit their Web site.”

Denny’s didn’t actually turn their Super Bowl landing page on until right after the first commercial aired during the game. Once it did go live, demand for the Denny’s Web site increased by 1700% on game night. Unfortunately, the site promptly crashed, so all that online demand went unfulfilled. The problems persisted through Tuesday, until after the promotion was over.

“When we attempted to go to www.Dennys.com during the game, we found a crashed Web site,” said Iaffaldano. “We actually attempted to access the site during the game when the ad first ran, both through the URL and through the paid search ads. But by the end of the game we had only succeeded in loading 15% of the site.” This despite the fact that “Denny’s” was one of the top traffic terms on Twitter during the game broadcast because of the offer.

Obviously the promotion was a relative success, he said. But it could have been more successful—for example with customers who might not know their closest Denny’s restaurants and who might have needed to access the online store locator.

“Here was a company that seemingly had their act together, but still thought they’d be able to just flip a switch during the game and suddenly accept all that traffic,” says Hershberg.

The contest isn’t over till you’ve watched the game films. When it comes to evaluating the marketing done around the Super Bowl, those replays can yield a wide variety of results.

That’s especially true this year, with buzz marketing becoming an ever-more-accepted tactic for creating brand awareness and association on the Web. That gives analysts more tools with which to judge the hits and misses in a big broadcast event like Super Bowl XLIII—even if those tools sometimes produce results that contradict other measures, such as search impact, or even themselves.

And yet, everyone seems to like the MC Hammer/ emcee McMahon parley by direct response marketer Cash4Gold.com.

Of course, search integration is the grand-daddy—okay, the much older brother—of Super Bowl ad metrics. Reprise Media, now a division of the Interpublic Group, has been doing post-game analysis of the search marketing plays for five years now.

This year’s scorecard found that only about two-thirds of the brands that ran spots during this month’s big game bought pay-per-click search ads against either their brands or their specific products.

While 95% of advertisers were visible on the Web through organic search—that is, showing up naturally on search results pages in Google and Yahoo—only 69% of those advertisers were buying search ads to make sure people found those sites.

That beats the 54% who made solid efforts to make sure searchers could find their content after the 2008 Super Bowl. But it still constitutes a missed marketing opportunity, says Peter Hershberg, managing partner at Reprise. “Advertisers spent $3 million for 30 seconds of air time plus the cost of production,” he says. “There’s an opportunity to extend the life of these assets online through search and social media. I don’t know that people are going to get your message just by watching the spot during the game.”

What’s more, Reprise research found 54% of this year’s viewers were expressing as much interest in the Bowl ads as in the Bowl game, as agency marketing director Anthony Iaffaldano pointed out in a mid-month Webinar.

That’s reflected in the number of places thoseTV spots showed up post-game. This year more than ever before, Super Bowl ads were syndicated around the Web, on YouTube and on USAToday.com but also on Hulu.com and many smaller video aggregator sites. “You’ve got all those commercials out there now, and they exist on a number of Web sites, not just in one place,” Hershberg says. “I’d say that’s one of the biggest changes we’ve seen since we started doing the scorecard in 2005.”

It’s also a good reason marketers should be making sure to direct visitors to their branded site with their message, rather than handing them off to a Web site without branding—or worse, to one where they might watch that Super Bowl spot while taking in a rival’s brand message. Reprise found that 30% of viewers reported that they were more likely to visit the Web site of a company that advertised during the Super Bowl than of the average company behind a random TV spot.

In other words, you’re buying good cred and high engagement with a spot in the big game, so don’t squander them by not following through online.

According to Reprise, the companies that did the best integrated marketing around their Super Bowl spots were predominantly the Web-centric veteran advertisers, including eTrade, CareerBuilder.com, Cars.com, GoDaddy.com and Cash4Gold.com, a first-time Super Bowl entrant. These companies including a clear call to action in their ads, provided value-adds in the form of extra content rewards to visitors who found them on the Web and in social networks, and helped that happen by means of paid search ads.

Only one in five Super Bowl ads built a clear call to action into the video content, Reprise found—anything from a simple listing of the URL to a more explicit statement about what value-added content viewers could find there.

Reprise has only been tracking the use of social media by Super Bowl advertisers for two years, but found that 51% of this year’s marketers did something to link their TV and online campaigns to a community Web channel of some kind: a Facebook page, posting videos to YouTube, posting a Twitter link, and so one.

But while that social activity is heartening, it still seems to be in the experimental phase, siloed off from other online initiatives. Only one quarter of Bowl advertisers set up any links between their social media efforts around the game and any other content they were providing on the Web, Iaffaldano pointed out.

Online trading firm eTrade did a particularly good job of integrating its “eTrade Baby” TV campaign with all the different online channels, Iaffaldano said: a good call to action in the spot, strong social media presence, a long list of pay-per-click keywords across the search engines, and in particular an engaging landing page that rewarded viewers who made the move online to find out more.

The company built buzz weeks before kickoff time with a landing page that included outtakes from the “Baby” series, along with a link to YouTube, to an eTrade Baby Facebook page and an invitation to “Follow me @etradebaby on Twitter.”

Another big winner in Reprise’s eyes was first-time Bowl marketer Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and the job it did presenting a consistent message about its “Plant a Seed” campaign to renovate playing fields across a number of Web channels. The TV spot contained a strong call to action using the most logical, easy to remember URL: www.FrostedFlakes.com. And when viewers did act and go to that site, they were presented right away with a landing page relevant to the commercial that led them there, with an explanation of the “Plant a Seed” program, links to YouTube to see the ad again, other links to social media, and a chance to nominate their own local playground site as a candidate for renewal.

“If someone is interested enough in the commercial to go online and search for your brand, it’s a lot more impactful for that person to see a page that ties in immediately with what they’ve already seen,” Iaffaldano said. “It not only reinforces the original message but it provides them with a ‘bread crumb trail’ that can lead them to the concept that’s most appropriate, in this case the very specific landing page on the Frosted Flakes Web site.”

In other words, if you’ve got them interested enough to turn away from their TV screens, don’t risk losing them with landing-page confusion.

By contrast, says Hershberg , the Doritos brand ran an expensive and buzz-worthy campaign to find another user-generated Super Bowl commercial but then failed to run a paid search campaign helping people find it on the Web.

“That was especially tough because the Doritos commercial was hidden online behind a vanity domain, www.snackstrongproductions.com, which had nothing to do with the brand and no way for people to find it,” Hershberg says.

And some of the brands running ads in the Super Bowl barely got up off the Astroturf in terms of leading viewers smoothly from the TV screen to the monitor screen. Hershberg cites Taco Bell, a handful of entertainment properties and the Denny’s restaurant chain for particularly poor execution.

Denny’s campaign has been touted as a success. The chain offered to give away its signature Galnd Slam breakfast from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. local time at each of its 1,600 restaurants in North America on the Tuesday after the game. The offer was mentioned in two spots during the game and post-game, as well as in a full-page Monday ad in USA Today, in a mention on NBC’s “Today Show”, and in e-mail sent to its “Denny’s Breakfast Club.” The promotion reported drew 2 million diners on February 3.

All well and good. But in terms of online integration, the campaign was a fumble, says Reprise.

“They had no paid search, and their ad had no clear call to action,” Hershberg says. “The bigger issue for them, however, was that they were completely unprepared to have people come to visit their Web site.”

Denny’s didn’t actually turn their Super Bowl landing page on until right after the first commercial aired during the game. Once it did go live, demand for the Denny’s Web site increased by 1700% on game night. Unfortunately, the site promptly crashed, so all that online demand went unfulfilled. The problems persisted through Tuesday, until after the promotion was over.

“When we attempted to go to www.Dennys.com during the game, we found a crashed Web site,” said Iaffaldano. “We actually attempted to access the site during the game when the ad first ran, both through the URL and through the paid search ads. But by the end of the game we had only succeeded in loading 15% of the site.” This despite the fact that “Denny’s” was one of the top traffic terms on Twitter during the game broadcast because of the offer.

Obviously the promotion was a relative success, he said. But it could have been more successful—for example with customers who might not know their closest Denny’s restaurants and who might have needed to access the online store locator.

“Here was a company that seemingly had their act together, but still thought they’d be able to just flip a switch during the game and suddenly accept all that traffic,” says Hershberg.