On Sunday, Barkley’s partners connected online for #BarkleyBowl, our annual virtual Super Bowl watch party. Afterward and into the next morning, the prevailing sentiment among some here, plus many in the ad community and in the media was that the ads were not as good as in previous years.

Overall, XLVI’s spots weren’t the raucous, in-your-face, physical comedy laden epics of previous years. But when it comes to creative execution in today’s media environment, do they really have to be?

Super Bowl ads have to be outstanding to break through clutter, right?

Not anymore. There’s no such thing as clutter in Super Bowl ads… people watch and talk about them all. It’s the one day of the year when people actually wake up in the morning excited to watch advertising. Ads of the past had to rise above the noise to make it into water cooler conversation the Monday after. Now, the whole world watches with today’s water cooler in hand – the second (and often third) screens of mobile and online-based social media. This doesn’t mean that the TV spots don’t have to be good. They just don’t have to be great.

So how did this year’s TV spots surpass all other years and their seemingly “better” creative execution? The combination of three factors:

1. Brand – How well does each advertiser craft an interesting story? The old-fashioned way, but less loud and more relevant to today’s balanced 53% male, 47% female Super Bowl audience. Doritos, M&Ms and Bud Light all did this well.

2. Conversation – Who needs to wait until Monday morning? Viewers now immediately share feedback or absorb the opinions of their friends, in real time. This factor alone could crown this year as most successful. H&M’s “David Beckham Bodywear” and Chrysler’s “Halftime in America” were the most talked about spots on Twitter. According to Bluefin Labs, this year’s Super Bowl saw a 500% increase in Twitter traffic over last year peaking at over 12,000 tweets per second, with the aforementioned ads garnering about 100,000 comments each.

3. Action – Does “action” mean how well a brand sells its products or services? Not really. It’s about how effective it is at sending the viewer to the next point of content or information. The intended outcome: keep the conversation going! Advertisers are no longer content with slapping an obligatory URL in the last few frames of their spot, hoping to generate site traffic.

• Chevy provided its Game Time mobile app, the letsdothis.com microsite, an OK Go music video, multiple TV spots and callouts for a variety of content throughout the entire broadcast.
• Coke invited viewers to party along with their iconic polar bears during their Polar Bowl Party Live.
• Many other advertisers prompted a variety of connections into Facebook pages, YouTube videos and several more into expanded content via Shazam tags.

Engagement is the key to success for this year’s ads. It’s beyond the 30-60 seconds that brands invest in airtime. Measuring success has also transcended the PR generated both before and after the game. Today, it’s about “the during” – how much activity you can generate in more interactive content peripheral to the game experience. Further, how effective you are at leading game viewers to that content. In that respect, advertisers have never been better.