Some religions believe in an afterlife. Others do not. On Madison Avenue after the Super Bowl, most everyone is a believer.

That is because the Internet, digital video recorders, mobile devices and other technologies are giving a strong postgame presence to the commercials that appear each year during the Super Bowl. The spots can be watched later on websites, forwarded to friends through e-mail, discussed on message boards and assessed on blogs.

It is a far cry from just a few years ago, when the Super Bowl commercials disappeared after the game, along with the losing team.
Now the strategy among sponsors is to maximise post-game exposure to help amortise the eye-popping cost of a Super Sunday spot —- this time, an estimated $2.7 million for each 30 seconds of national air time.

For instance, the commercials “got a higher audience than the game” in homes with the TiVo video recorder service, said Todd Juenger, vice president and general manager for audience research and measurement at the New York office of TiVo.

“ There is rewinding and multiple viewing of the ads” on Super Bowl Sunday, he added. “It’s one of the few times it happens.”
Super Bowl XLII, broadcast by Fox on Sunday, was no exception, Juenger said. TiVo’s list of most-watched spots was topped by one of two for E-Trade featuring a “talking” baby; in this spot, the infant spits up at the end of his spiel.

The E-Trade commercial, created by the Grey Global division of the WPP Group, was followed on the TiVo list by one featuring Justin Timberlake, for a music promotion co-sponsored by Pepsi-Cola and Amazon; a spot for Doritos created by a consumer for a contest last year; one for Coca-Cola Classic that spoofed the red-blue political divide; and a spot with Carmen Electra for Ice Breakers Ice Cubes gum.

The results “say something about the TiVo audience in terms of what works to get something rewound,” Juenger said, listing tactics like humour, celebrities and surprise punch lines.

The Timberlake spot came from BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group. Pepsi-Cola and Doritos are both owned by PepsiCo. The Coca-Cola spot was created by Wieden & Kennedy. The ad for Ice Breakers, a Hershey brand, was from TracyLocke, also part of Omnicom.
Scores of websites are offering computer users a chance to watch video clips of the Super Bowl commercials, among them AOL, MSNBC, MySpace, Spike and YouTube.

During the Fox broadcast of the game — watched by 97.5 million viewers, a record for a Super Bowl, data from Nielsen estimated — the announcers twice reminded the audience to “log on to myspace.com” if “you’ve missed any of the Super Bowl commercials.” (MySpace and Fox are owned by the News Corp.)
Visitors to YouTube, owned by Google, are even being offered an incentive to vote for their favourite spot at a special section of the site (youtube.com/adblitz): The commercial attracting the most votes will be featured on the YouTube home page next Tuesday.

The spot that had been watched most often on YouTube as of Monday afternoon was for SoBe Life Water, sold by PepsiCo, featuring animated lizards dancing to “Thriller.”

Not far behind was a spot for GoDaddy, a Web services company, which directed viewers to godaddy.com to watch a risque commercial that the company said Fox had refused to run.

The SoBe spot was created by the Arnell Group, another Omnicom agency, and the GoDaddy.com spot was created internally.
Bob Parsons, the chief executive of GoDaddy, wrote Monday on his blog (bobparsons.com) that the “banned” spot had been watched online Sunday more than 2 million times. And traffic on Monday was “up over four times normal levels,” he added. “Our website has never been busier,” Parsons said.

The cross-promotion between the GoDaddy commercial and website was indicative of the increasing efforts by Super Bowl sponsors to integrate their TV and online presences.

“ The ‘torture test’ for brands beyond their Super Bowl ads is how to make it easy for consumers to find the ads and engage with them, whether you put them on websites, on YouTube or make them easy to search for on Google,” said Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president at the Nielsen Online Strategic Services division of the Nielsen Co.“I think a lot advertisers are still struggling to organise around this,” Blackshaw said, as they try to coordinate the work of various agencies that specialise in different tasks like traditional ads, digital ads or media placement.

“ The conflict comes to a head in the Super Bowl,” he added, “when there’s a lot of money riding on the campaign.”