How to Hijack Thousands — if Not Millions — in Superbowl Advertising

Hashtags can mean free leads, yours for the taking.

Did you know that most of the money in Superbowl advertising doesn’t even go into the TV commercials you see during the event? No, most of it goes into promoting the smaller businesses, on the local and regional level via newspapers, local TV, radio, internet, etc., in the days leading up-to and during the event. Coca-Cola and Budweiser aren’t the only ones spending boku bucks on Superbowl advertising, so is Bob’s Bar & Grill down the street, Joe’s Chicken Wing Hut around the corner, and the Beverage Mart across town. Main Street wants your Superbowl business, too — and they’re just as aggressive, spending millions in local and regional advertising, not to mention online, to get it.

Case in point, over the weekend, one of my restaurant clients’ competitors was running a Twitter contest all over the radio as part of their Superbowl promotion: Simply tweet “#[whatever]” for your chance to win a $20 gift card to their restaurant.

That’s certainly a great idea, a great use of social media, a great way to get their name out there, to build their brand, and ultimately bring in more customers, and I know exactly how many thousands of dollars they paid for it, because the radio station had also contacted my client about doing it. And I told him NOT to.

In my opinion, that’s a lot of money to pay for hashtags — it would be different if they were call-in leads, or email leads — something “captive” or exclusive — but hashtags are “free” and there for the taking by anyone, as you will see…

That’s my logic, anyway.

It was apparent the competitor really wanted to do the promotion anyway, there were even choice words over the whole thing, and with much deeper “corporate” pockets than my client, they had the budget to do it. So rather than argue and fight about it, we went ahead and “let” them have it — but not without a plan. See, we let them pay the thousands of dollars to run it, but ultimately, we reaped all the same benefits from it — for free.

Here’s how:

From the moment the promotion went “live,” all weekend long, my client and his team monitored Twitter, watching for those hashtags. They immediately followed everyone who “signed-up” for the competitor’s promotion and then followed-up with a mention and their own special offer.

Hundreds, then thousands, of fresh leads over the course of the weekend, all for free. Three days into it, my client has picked up more than 500 new follows — not necessary a lot on the grand scale, but for a local establishment in an area of about 35,000 people, that’s a nice piece of the pie for one weekend — and they’re still coming in.

Walk-in traffic showed a boost over the weekend, although it’s hard to tell if it was actually from the promotion, but they did pick up a couple of catering leads, potentially worth thousands, that definitely came from it.

All of this from a radio promotion his competitor ran and paid for!

So thank you Mr. Competitor for doing all the dirty work and putting up all the cash to generate these awesome, new leads for my client, and thank you Twitter, for making it so easy to “steal” them.

On Twitter, it’s all there, free for the taking — my client’s only cost was the time and energy to gather it.

Now I’m sure this idea can apply to all industries and promotions — not just restaurants, but retail, services, even B2B. I can’t help but think of the well-publicized #EsuranceSave30 contest that was also going on during the Superbowl. A quick search of that hashtag could mean hundreds of thousands of fresh insurance leads — of course, all those leads were meant for Esurance, and don’t think they won’t follow-up on them, because they most certainly will. (That’s why they do it.)

But if Geico and Progressive are smart, they’ll be following up on them, too.

— P.

Phil Autelitano is founder/CEO of Mediarazzi, a leading developer and producer of TV channels for connected TV platforms including Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV — Paula Deen Channel, Oscar de la Hoya’s Ring TV, Where’s the ‘80’s?, Whisky a Go Go, et al — www.mediarazzi.com

@PhilAutelitano