Dive Brief:
- Fox is the broadcaster for this year’s Super Bowl and part of that offering will be a free live stream that will include local advertising dynamically inserted into the stream based on the viewer’s location, according to Variety.
- Fox is working with more than 170 of its local affiliates to sell and deliver local ads for the live stream, and the affiliates will have access to the same ad inventory for both the linear TV broadcast and the online live stream.
- In other live streaming Super Bowl advertising news, Wix announced its campaign via a press release and used both Facebook Live and YouTube Live to officially launch the effort.
Dive Insight:
The two news items point to the growing importance of live streaming video as a part of the Super Bowl game and advertising experience. NBC broadcast the Super Bowl in 2015 and also offered a live stream of the game that included local ads. This year is Fox’s first time putting together this online game package.
The main difference this year is the growth in live streaming, which is now available across a number of platforms and is drawing more viewers, suggesting local advertisers could get a bigger bang for their buck this year. At the same time, sports viewing on traditional TV is declining, which has been evident in lower ratings for NFL games and lower ad revenue this year. The growing trend toward live streaming sports programming was also apparent in the Rio Olympic Games last summer, with TV viewing down 21% while live streaming options reached almost 50 million viewers.
Even though live streaming is gaining in popularity, the majority of Super Bowl viewers will be watching on linear TV. Last year’s live stream averaged 1.4 million viewers while the TV audience reached 111.9 million.
Last year Wix had teasers for its Super Bowl campaign out in December, but this year the brand held out until less than three weeks before the game and then decided to go with live video to launch the campaign. This year only one brand – Intel – had released a teaser ad by this past weekend, and that ad is part of a much larger effort that includes in-game 360-degree video replays that will put viewer in the middle of the on-field action.
