Giving a whole new meaning to sky sports

NET RESULTS:The TV broadcast of Super Bowl unites Americans who often watch it as much for the ads as the game, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

THE EVENING flight from Chicago to San Francisco was sparsely populated last Sunday. Part of the reason was that United Airlines needed to move a massive plane – a Boeing 777 wider than my Dublin house, more typically used for trans- oceanic flights – out to the west coast from the Windy City. But the other, and no doubt main reason, was the Super Bowl.

America’s biggest annual television extravaganza – easily the only TV event in an era of digital recorders and streaming TV services that brings together the entire American nation in front of the box at the same time – kept flying volumes low. Think Dublin airport or O’Connell Street just as Ireland runs out on to the pitch during a World Cup match and you get the picture.

What passengers there were were mostly congregated around TV sets in the airport bars and waiting lounges. The people happily sitting in the bar and lounge area seats deprived of a TV view were mainly foreigners unappreciative of the finer points of fourth down strategies or tactics around the line of scrimmage.

Just as nearly every Irish person joins the Green Army when Ireland is in the World Cup, so too Americans, who otherwise would never have the remotest interest in watching a 300lb helmeted behemoth attempt to flatten a quarterback, will tune in to this single game.

The big game this year, between Wisconsin’s Green Bay Packers and US ambassador to Ireland Dan Rooney’s Pittsburgh Steelers, was only going into the second quarter as the aircraft boarded. Many passengers hung on in the lounge, glued to the screen and the gameplay, until the last possible minute.

Thanks to a mix of high- and low-tech from the male and female pilot team, though, they needn’t have felt deprived for too long. Shortly into the flight, the pilots updated passengers on the score going into the fourth quarter – then told the delighted passengers that they had patched the audio system into an AM radio station 38,000 feet beneath us.

“The reception isn’t great but it should be enough for you to follow the action in the game,” the captain said.

How cool is that? United always dedicates one channel of its audio system to live air traffic control, letting passengers listen in to the strangely calming chatter among commercial pilots all around the sky and controllers below. But live sports? Who knew?

Alongside the game and the house parties centred around it, the other Super Bowl highlight is the advertising.

Yes, strange as it may seem, the commercials are as anticipated as some films and many have the same kind of computer-generated special- effects spend, and create much post-game chatter.

The technology industry is no stranger to the Bowl in other ways. Apple is credited with seriously upping the ad game for the big game, way back in 1984, when it famously launched its first Macintosh computer with a brash, visually delicious Ridley Scott-directed commercial referencing George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.

The ad is considered by many in marketing to be one of the best ever produced. These days, you’d want to have deep pockets and produce something equally amazing, given that the reported cost for a 30-second spot aired during this year’s game was up to $3 million. Yes, folks, that’s a cool $100,000 a second.

But then, you are getting most of a nation’s TV audience, plus these days, hopefully endless replays on social media sites like YouTube and Facebook. Or, in some cases, preplays.

To its (perhaps initial) dismay, Volkswagen along with a few other advertisers found its Super Bowl offering – an amusing and generally well-liked ad for the Passat featuring a small child in a Darth Vader costume – had launched three days BEFORE the game when someone leaked it to, where else, YouTube.

Thanks to a Facebook crosspost, I saw it a few hours after it had gone up, when it had a few thousand views.

By Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, the ad had achieved some 13 million views. Three million more had watched it by the morning after the Bowl, and the junior Vader – an adorable six-year-old survivor of open heart surgery – was getting airtime with his mother on national TV news. Touchdown for Volkswagen!

So maybe, to use an old software developer joke, a Super Bowl ad prelaunch is now going to be seen as a feature rather than a bug. That’s a significant number of views given that the entire (record-sized) audience for this year’s Super Bowl was 111 million (and given that a certain number of viewers will have taken a “comfort break” during the ad and missed it).

The other geekish advertisement of note was one from Motorola in which it hyped its new iPad rival, the Xoom tablet computer, with a spot echoing, what else, the Apple 1984 commercial.

Without mentioning Apple by name – just as the original Apple ad never mentioned rival IBM by name (causing many who viewed the ad years later to assume the Big Brother-ish reference to be Microsoft) – Motorola presented its tablet as the heroic challenger to the world’s mass conformity to some other anonymous tablet.

Wow – self-referential, high-tech Super Bowl ads. May the Force be with you.