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Some brands are backing away from social media war rooms, but first-time Super Bowl advertiser LG is going all in on Sunday.
About 30 to 40 reps from LG, Mindshare, iCrossing, HG Ad and Twitter will staff a war room in Mindshare's New York office, working the electronic brand's Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels during the game.
According to a Mindshare rep, "a great deal of content will be planned in advance," but a team of creative and community managers will also crank out social posts on the fly. The team also has a dedicated paid media budget that it will use to run specific well-performing content as ads.
LG is also using a few listening tools during the game, like Kairos—a platform that breaks down and analyzes social chatter in real time. The goal is to dig into small conversations happening on Twitter instead of zeroing in on big, trending posts.
Leading up to Sunday, LG is also encouraging people to tune into the broadcast with a special Twitter button that will send a reminder to watch. The campaign is pushing the hashtag #ManFromTheFuture to stoke excitement for its commercial and a prize promotion.
The company is also testing Twitter's so-called conversational video ads, which encourage users to tweet by clicking on a button located below a brand tweet.
LG isn't the only brand investing in war rooms—Anheuser-Busch and Wix are two other big names investing in dedicated war rooms.
War rooms on the decline?
Like last year, Anheuser-Busch is setting up social rooms in St. Louis and New York to manage social chatter and will also have folks on location at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, where the game is held.
Still, there's no doubt that marketers struggle to replicate Oreo's famous "Dunk in the Dark" tweet, which was crafted on the fly in a war room in 2013. That struggle could lead to a decline in war rooms—Hyundai and its agency Innocean have staffed them in the past, but is now using an "always-on" newsroom that constantly monitor social posts.
"I have to wonder if some of the smaller brands have stopped spending their resources because it's pretty hard to get attention when there is just so much huge volume of traffic and you're competing with brands that have 30 people creating things," said Talia Wischmann, associate director of PR and emerging media at Space150.
Meghan McCormick, social strategy director at Deutsch New York agreed, adding that Super Bowl social pushes also require a big paid media push nowadays.
"Instead of brands having a war room where they're creating assets, they know that in order to be seen it's not about being super clever. It's about having a piece of creative that is smart, strategic and clever that should be supported with paid [ads]," she said.
"Gone are the days when brands' organic, real-time content can naturally rise to the top. Brands have to be a little bit smarter because of the way that algorithms across all of the social platforms are changing to demote organic content."
