I think that the Super Bowl ads fell short this year.  Teasers for ads and ads that were "leaked" on YouTube became old news by the time they aired and offered no element of surprise.  The creative was, well, not that creative.  But something exciting did happen.  This year was a testing ground for advertising on the second screen.  During the big game,  brands like Best Buy, Pepsi, Toyota, and Bud Light partnered with Shazam, a popular app that can recognize music and television programing, to deliver customized offers and content to viewers that tagged the spot.  This morning, Shazam reported "millions of tags" during the game.  What will be more interesting to find out is what viewers actually did after they tagged the spot?  Did they enter a sweepstakes?  Watch a music video? Like the brand on Facebook? 

In my upcoming report, "Under The Hood Of Social TV: Audio Fingerprinting,"  I answer frequently asked questions from interactive marketers about social TV and audio fingerprinting.  In the social TV context, audio fingerprinting is the technology that enables apps like Shazam to recognize the audio on your television and deliver custom content.  In contrast, other apps like GetGlue or MTV’s WatchWith don’t use audio fingerprinting technology, so they require that viewers to identify what they’re watching manually.  So what does this all mean?  Well, the way we watch television is changing.  New technologies, second screen devices, and multitasking behavior are having brands rethink the 30-second spot.  And while most of the spots fell short yesterday, leading brands used one of the largest sporting events of the year to test an emerging technology that I'm keeping a close eye on.