The anticipation surrounding the Super Bowl ad rollouts, is rivaling that of the game itself, for smart marketers have unleashed the ad buzz weeks ahead of the game, with multi-week contests and teasers, extending their exposure of ad expenditures of up to $3 million for prime Super Bowl, well past just the traditional one-time showing during the game.

The trigger is the Super Bowl, but the power to engage before, during and past the game, is the Super “Social” Bowl — a marketer’s dream .

Harnessing emerging venues definitely amortizes costs and in, and of itself, almost rationalizes the significant expenditure for major companies, a point that I am sure is not lost on those CFOs who rant relentlessly about ROI and the Super Bowl ads.

Social or not, it still all starts with old-fashioned TV spots, but spots so designed to draw in an audience through its humor, focus on causes, or creative story line, ones that trigger social media conversations. It’s by no means the first year that the Super “Social” Bowl is tapped, but it certainly seems to be the year social networking charges onto the field.

Whether pre-game, during game, or post game, the social-media maneuvers taking place this year seem to play into a two-pronged universal strategy: to leverage the investment and key into consumer behavior. In terms of leveraging, it will be interesting to see who is truly able to capitalize on their Super Bowl venture. There are companies that are already standing out from the crowd such as (among others), the integrated strategy that Teleflora has with their mobile apps; E-trade’s creative concepts in utilizing their wisecracking baby character to interact with sports commentators and anchors; Audi’s first use of the hashtag on its major TV spot during the games’ first break, hoping to have viewers interact and spark conversations on Twitter during the game. Volkswagen, armed with research that TV viewers go online to check out sports-news sites during the Super Bowl broadcast, plans to respond by doing a takeover of ESPN’s mobile site during the game. Others are showing outtakes from their popular commercials on YouTube and are advertising on YouTube during the days before the Bowl. Still others, like Budweiser, are tying in TV “tease” commercials with ads on Facebook pages.

As to consumer behaviors, a recent survey from Lightspeed Research estimated that nearly two-thirds of viewers aged 18 to 34 who plan to watch the Super Bowl, also plan to make use of a smartphone. Of those with a smartphone, 59% will be sending emails or text messages about the game, 18% will be checking out ads online from their phones, and 18% will visit advertiser websites. And, according to the survey, almost a third, or 32%, will be posting comments about the game on a social network.

The Super “Social” Bowl will surely set an all time record for the fusion of social media with broadcast media, broadcast events and live events everywhere in the communications and advertising industry. Super Bowl or not, marketers should take note…

The first time that Pepsi elects to forgo its past 26 years of advertising on the Super Bowl and selects to spend $20 million for a massive multi-channel interactive social media campaign, it collides with the Annual Trust Barometer from Edelman PR, which reports that peer to peer trust has surprisingly waned in favor of more credible sources.  Not that, at first glance, one has anything to do with the other, except that just when viral marketing seems like a smart strategy, smarter than even Super Bowl advertising, the Trust Barometer’s survey results show that trust in friends and peers as credible sources has dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, in the last two years.

And the parameters of the Pepsi Refresh campaign is all about the populous votes of “friends and peers” who will decide as to which ideas or projects Pepsi should fund in grant money in six categories: health, arts and culture, food and shelter, the planet, the neighborhoods and education. It will be the people’s choice as to which of the 1000 ideas submitted are to receive grants that range from $5,000 to $250,000, figures not to be taken lightly.  And the criteria for voting is exactly — what?

How does that work?  “Oh this is cool, I think I will vote for this.” Click. Or, “My boyfriend is really into bands, so I think I will vote for that.” Click.  How about, “I’ll feel good if I vote for the local health clinic.” Click.  Some ideas submitted are more political as in “Help free healthcare clinic expand services to uninsured in rural Tennessee (TN).”  Click.  (I live in rural TN.)  Or I live in Kansas so I vote for, “Build a fitness center for all students in Hays, Kansas community.”

Click. Click. Click.  “And the check goes to…” Every month, Pepsi will award up to 32 grants to projects voted on by the most clicks.

By all accounts the “ Pepsi Refresh” initiative is everything that an ideal interactive campaign can be – creative, innovative, highly engaging and very popular, while building on the brand in a fun and social way.  But I venture to say that the challenge that Pepsi faces, and that other companies are bound to also face, as they delve deeper into social media’s ever-expanding communication opportunities is that at some point, critical thinking will matter.

Look, the “Pepsi Refresh” program should be nothing like an American Idol segment where voters root for the next star just because they “like.”  Nor should it be like clicking on “like” on a photo or comment on Facebook.  In creating a program that allows a populous vote to decide on grants, votes that can make a difference as to whether a school’s music program gets funded or whether an elder care facility expands its programs, Pepsi’s challenge is to go against the very fiber of social media’s whims, set a criteria upon which they can deliberate, and turn the populous vote into a credible one.

Failing that, it is but a game — one that is being played out with a lot of money, with no sense of fairness and with little trust in the voters’ selection.

Any serious and worthy projects submitted should not mistake it for anything else.

It was not the Super Bowl ads that mattered so much to the brands that paid an obscene amount of money to have their ads aired on the biggest Advertising Sunday of the year…  It’s what happened afterwards, or as in Denny’s free breakfast for America, what happened the “morning after.”

What pushed the staying power of the Super Bowl ads this year was the intensive twittering effect.  You would think that all the tweeting would have happened between football and advertising fans.  But no, the biggest “chatter” emerged from the brands themselves, according to AdFreak.com, brand managers who worked the twittering from the vantage point of a well-planned marketing campaign.

So much for spontaneous twittering…

Anyway, none of the ads this year got the five stars from Fanfest (or, for that matter from any other reviewers) that would propel them into national stardom vis-à-vis consumers and resonate with them for any length of time.  Maybe nothing can.  Maybe we’ve seen it all…

But there are those of us who do remember this year’s 25th anniversary of the introduction of Apple’s Macintosh in 1984, the one that came out with a foreboding futuristic theme that brought out both wonder and astonished terror in the viewers.

That had staying power, beyond a twittering effect and well past any “morning after” sales gimmick.  It had staying power because it broke through all creative boundaries ever tried before.  And as The NY Times wrote in today’s edition,  “people still talk about it” 25 years later.

Oh well, as a diehard optimist, there’s always next year….