NEW YORK — Aaron Magness plans to watch the Super Bowl on his 55-inch-screen television, with an iPhone in one hand and an iPad at his hip.
For the 34-year-old marketing executive, today’s game is only part of the fun. Interacting with friends about what’s happening on the field — and with those TV commercials — will keep Magness tapped into Twitter and Facebook as well.
“I can easily armchair quarterback on a much larger scale,” said Magness, a vice president of marketing for online eyewear company Coastal Contacts Inc. in Vancouver, British Columbia. “Instead of telling my friends next to me, ‘I can’t believe he called that timeout,’ now I can tell 2,000 followers.”
The proliferation of tablets and smartphones has combined with the growth of social media to spark a flurry of online activity during televised games. Advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Volkswagen have taken notice, turning to YouTube and Twitter to generate buzz and stretch the $3.5 million on average they had to pay for a 30-second spot on NBC Super Bowl telecast.
“There’s a concerted effort to create more value out of the advertising during, but also after, the actual event,” Radha Subramanyam, senior vice president of media analytics for media- viewership tracker Nielsen, said in an interview. It’s interactive TV in a way that was never quite imagined, she said.
“Especially for event television, we find the No. 1 thing that people are doing online is some form of social-media engagement,” Subramanyam said.
The biggest event comes today, when 115 million people are predicted by Brad Adgate of Horizon Media to tune in for the rematch of the New York Giants and New England Patriots. The Super Bowl is typically the most-watched U.S. broadcast of the year.
The last time the Giants and Patriots met in a Super Bowl, in 2008, tablets were barely used and Apple’s iPhone was newly introduced. Twitter hadn’t hit the mainstream, and TV watchers got on Facebook from clunkier computers.
It’s a different world today, said Adam Cahan, chief executive at IntoNow, a companion screen application owned by Yahoo Inc.
“Tablets changed the world because of the way people are using them constantly,” Cahan said in an interview. “The iPad experience is one that marries itself incredibly well to television.”
An estimated 144 million Americans own tablet computers or smartphones, said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics.
Of those, 40 percent use the devices daily while watching television, according to Nielsen.
