In that context, Kia's five hours' worth of semi-satiric substi-porn aren't actually that -- that -- unusual. Many of the other ads that will air during the game tonight won't be airing for the first time, either. They'll have made their debuts already ... on the Internet. Volkswagen's Super Bowl spot has already been posted to YouTube, where it has garnered over 3 million views. Chevy's? More than 1 million views. Honda's, starring a re-Bueller-ized Matthew Broderick? Over 11 million.
In part, that's about marketers racing each other for relevance in an environment where marketing messages no longer need to be confined to TV. But it's a bigger story, too -- of communications, overall, breaking free of the boxes that used to contain them. One function of the media, traditionally, has been the regulation not just of information, and not just of entertainment, but of time itself. Our broadcast networks, in particular, have segmented time into neat little boxes -- 30 seconds here, 30 minutes there -- and populated them with sounds and images that entertain and (occasionally) edify us. They have plotted our days into grids, scheduling our experience and helping us to forget that, in fact, there's very little that's natural about a time slot.
Super Bowl ads have been pretty much the Platonic culmination of the gridded media system. They have operated on the assumption that a Big Event itself (the experience of, the economics of) is significant not just because of its content, but because of the community it convenes (111 million people!). The Super Bowl is time rendered collective and contained -- so of course marketers want to buy themselves a chunk of it. When better to make your pitch to the world than during the period when the maximum amount of eyes are focused on, effectively, the same screen?
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YouTube, and social networks in general, encourage precisely the opposite marketing model. Rather than containing consumer attention, they disperse it. They take the typical 30-second ad spot and condense it to five seconds ... or expand it to five hours. Or both. Or neither. It doesn't matter, because digital spaces remove time as both a constraint and a value in commercial production, allowing for marketing that insinuates itself on its intended audiences much more slowly, and much more manipulatively, and potentially much more effectively, than its analog counterparts.
You'd think all that would be bad news for broadcast networks, with marketers trading YouTube for boob tube and abandoning the pricey Super Bowl altogether. Why buy the milk, and all that. But: Not only are marketers continuing to pay for something they could ostensibly get for free; they're paying more for it than they ever have before. They're still finding value -- millions of dollars worth of it -- in the connective consciousness that the Super Bowl represents.