As long as you weren’t living under a rock for week before the Super Bowl, you would have heard about Sobe’s 3-D Super Bowl commercial. Free 3-D glasses were available at stores. If you tuned into the half-time spectacle when the ad aired, you would have seen football players in leotards, dancing lizards, and the Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Lewis mutating into a lizard—all in 3-D. The commercial was memorable, but why? Grace Fala, professor of communication, offers some insight.

In your professional opinion, was the commercial effective and why?

Yes and no. It was effective in that it demanded audience participation in three ways: before, during and after the commercial. The ‘before’ involved the viewer actually going to the store to pick up the glasses. The ‘during’, of course, involved putting on the glasses and actually watching the commercial, and the ‘after’ involved discussing the commercial and what it was like to watch it in 3-D. It was ineffective in that the composition of the commercial was unmemorable other than the fact that it was 3-D.

How was it different from other commercials?

The audience participation was more physical. For the Sobe commercial, viewers had to actually cut out the glasses, fold them, and put them on, and by doing so, their time investment warranted more interest when the commercial actually aired. The more invested a person is with their body, the more they are likely to remember it.

What does this mean about the future of advertising?

What about the future of TV in general? TV’s are now made to be HD-ready, and some are even 3-D ready. This means that in the near future, we will be seeing more and more 3-D commercials, and then it will spread to actual shows, until all of TV is 3-D. Since business and industry is normally at the forefront of innovation, the success of these types of commercials will dictate where technology and TV-watching are headed.

Ellen Santa Maria ’12, Juniata Online Journalist