San Diego’s Covario, a five-year-old startup that provides analytics and services for digital marketing, convened its annual users conference in downtown San Diego yesterday. The event draws top marketing executives from companies like Intel, Procter & Gamble, and Research In Motion (RIM), which led Covario to develop a movie theme around the “Top Guns” of search, social media, and digital advertising.
Dressed like Tom Cruise in a leather jacket and aviator glasses, Covario co-founder Russ Mann took the stage to announce, “I’m Russ Mann, CEO of Covario—and ‘Maverick.’ “
Yet with the Super Bowl looming as the single biggest U.S. advertising event (distinct from the weeks-long World Cup or Olympic Games), Mann might have made a bigger impression if he had dressed like Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu, with his trademark long, curly hair.
TV commercials for the Super Bowl, which are estimated this year to cost $3 million for 30 seconds, have long been in a league of their own. Nielsen Sports media research estimates that almost half of those watching the game this Sunday are actually tuning in to watch the commercials more than the game. More than 106 million people watch last year’s game.
At Covario’s event yesterday, some of the most interesting insights stemmed from efforts by the chief marketing officers at major companies to bridge the gap between online digital marketing, where everything can be quantified, and old media marketing, where advertisers relied on focus groups and intuition in the hopes that ad spending will translate into greater product sales.
Advertisers these days view TV advertising as a catalyst, said Sean Corcoran, a senior interactive marketing analyst for Cambridge, MA-based Forrester Research. In a keynote presentation yesterday, Corcoran said “the Millenials” (people born in 1980 and later) tend to multi-task—they’ll check the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) during a movie and player stats during
