Is it possible to get fans to switch over from all the staged fun of having to listen to Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz? YouTube are betting it is...
Now that we know which teams will be facing each other in the Super Bowl, we can all go and get really excited about planning what we're going to do during the half time show instead of actually watching the performances, which haven't been all that good in recent years. Except for Bruno Mars, actually, he was great. Still, that's more than balanced out by what the Black Eyed Peas did to us, which we refuse to call a musical performance and are still claiming was an assault, although their lawyers have yet to respond.
YouTube are hoping that we're not alone in this desire to not watch what the NFL have in store for us and instead are planning their own entertainment, hoping that users will flick over from their TVs to YouTube to watch what's going on.
The whole thing will be hosted by Harley Morenstein from EpicMealTime, who promises that a man will jump in to a pool full of cheese, while word has it there will be stunts, fake ads made by YouTube stars including Freddie Wong, Rhett and Link and Toby Turner, as well as musical performances by someone other than Katy Perry.
According to the post made by YouTube on their blog announcing the show, the reason for this alternative is that there are a lot of people who watched the Super Bowl ads online last year in their YouTube AdBlitz. In fact, we apparently "watched more than 6.3 million hours' worth of Super Bowl ads on YouTube. That's enough time for you to fly from Phoenix to the moon and back 87,500 times, watch every NFL game in history 138 times, or listen to Katy Perry's "Roar" 84M times". We've got too much spare time...
On Youtube, "the notion of brands as creators and the commercial as content" is key, and the half time show will reflect that.
Anyway, the idea is that instead of being some form of traditional advertising, if YouTube can put together a big enough show that brings people to the site in droves, then they can start getting themselves a slice of the pie, and it also helps to blur the lines between content and advertising. Google’s managing director of brands, Suzie Reider, told Bloomberg that on Youtube "the notion of brands as creators and the commercial as content" is key, and the half time show will reflect that. In other words, no such thing as a free lunch with a pool full of cheese.
So the question you have to ask yourself is would you rahter watch Katy Perry, or a man dive in to liquid cheese from a height? The choice is yours...
Via The Verge