Super Bowl Ads 2012: YouTube Spoils Thrill of Watching Commercials During Game

The Super Bowl is notable for a lot of things. None may be more of a cultural phenomenon in this country than the fact that people tune in for the commercials.

It’s the one time a year that people will not mentally check-out or do other things, such as use the bathroom, in order to see the new advertisements that companies pay millions of dollars per 30 seconds to debut.

That may be going away soon due to YouTube and other online methods that these corporations are using to air their spots prior to the big game.

While the Internet has been used the past couple years to accentuate and enhance the interaction between companies and their Super Bowl commercials, most notably by GoDaddy.com, it’s now becoming a place to find the entire advertisement days or even weeks prior to their television debut.

This year, a number of brands already have their commercial out on the net.

Honda, Audi, Volkswagen, Cars.com and plenty of others have decided to prematurely audition their new spots on YouTube and other websites, which killed a large amount of buzz they could have generated by letting them remain a secret up until their national television premier.

The media already over-hypes the game and all of the potential story lines in the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl after the conference championships. There is no need to beat the advertisements into the ground, too.

It also spoils potential topics of conversation at a party if someone has already seen the ads and isn’t surprised and shocked with everyone else.

In our times, this translates over to social media and buzz will not be generated during the Super Bowl if everyone has already seen the ad a week ago.

Hopefully, a smart advertising agency has told their client to hold off on the big reveal until the actual game this year.

If it’s successful and social media explodes because of it, and the brand builds awareness due to their patience, hopefully more companies will follow suit and stop spoiling the surprise online.