There’s plenty of blame to throw around for why the modern Super Bowl is what it is: an overhyped orgy of athletics and advertising that starts too late, lasts too long and sometimes even provides a rollicking good evening of entertainment.
Blame Bart Starr, if you must, or Joe Namath. Better yet, blame Mike Ditka, Buddy Ryan and those 1985 Bears who humiliated the New England Patriots in a game so boring that even Boston fans stopped crying in their Sam Adams and just conceded their team just wasn’t good enough.
They’re all responsible in a way for teasing us with the idea that what’s billed as the biggest football spectacle of the year might actually be as good as Joe Namath predicted and others have shown over the years or — as the Bears and Starr’s Green Bay Packers showed — the game can be so dull that billions of viewers are more interested in watching the slew of advertisements that pay for the bloated spectacle.
It’s been said too many times that the ads are the best part of the Super Bowl. Advertisers themselves have fed that myth by holding their best stuff for the big game.
Interactivity kicks that part of the game up another level by making the ads something that can hold attention even beyond the 30 or 60 second slots into which they’ve been placed.
The most obvious spot for interactivity is via a storyline that continues beyond the ad’s allotted time. Imagine those Budweiser Clydesdales kicking a field goal — it’s been done, I know — and using the interactivity button to learn whether it’s good or bad. Chances are you won’t miss anything of the game and if you’re really into seeing every nanosecond of every play, you can use your manual dexterity to push both the interactive and pause buttons.
For those who don’t like distractions, there are interactive platforms that can provide you with the best of both worlds: the millisecond-by-millisecond grind of the on-field thrills and the opportunity to learn — or maybe even vote on — whether the field goal was good. Talk about multi-tasking. What more could you ask for? Drama on both ends of the scale.
Interactivity can even take the drama off the field and put it right in your living room in the midst of your Super Bowl party. There might be multiple views of the field; there might be multiple interactive possibilities to explore; but there is only one remote. In a crowd of Super Bowl partiers, with beverages flowing more freely than the New Orleans offense, imagine the impact of being the only person in control. You’ll either be more popular than Peyton Manning or more harried than Drew Brees — or, depending on your fan preferences, the reverse.
Imagine this situation. The Bud Clydes line up for the winning field goal against the washed up Coors Light coaches. The snap is good; the ball is sailing towards an end zone projected on an Apple iPad. The Sony cameras are clicking, the Panasonic videocams are rolling, fingers are poised over BlackBerries to tweet the results, and the program returns to the game. As the owner of the remote you control the party’s destiny. You determine whether you click to the interactive site for the field goal or return in time to see Manning change the play at the line.
What do you do?
And if that’s not more exciting than either the game or the ads that support the game then my name isn’t Archie Manning. Oh, wait a minute, my name isn’t Archie Manning. Nevermind.
