This year, Super Bowl viewers who care more about the ads than the game will have an alternate to the official half-time show — YouTube. That means many could potentially bypass the annual spectacle that serves as a showcase for ad spots that command as much as $4.5 million per 30-second spot and provide a stage for famous musical acts.
During the Feb. 1 game’s halftime show on NBC, Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz will perform. YouTube’s show, which will stream live, will feature some of the online video channel’s biggest personalities, including Freddie Wong and Toby Turner. All together, the YouTube personalities included pull in more than 60 million subscribers on their channels.
In contrast to the 30-second spots expected to run during the big game that were valued at as much as $10 million by network executives in a recent Forbes piece, YouTube’s Super Bowl content will include fake Super Bowl ads to compete with the ads shown during the game on the network, which often go viral and prompt nearly as much conversation as the game’s score.
Even if the online video channel’s gambit only pulls in a fraction of Super Bowl viewers—111 million people watched the game last year—it’s still a sizeable number of eyeballs.
The annual Super Bowl commercial watch has become a sport unto itself in recent years. Ad spots slated to run during the game are often released days and weeks in advance. In 2014, viewers spent 6.3 million hours watching Super Bowl ads on YouTube, according to MediaPost.
“YouTube is the place where people go to consume advertisements willingly,” YouTube celebrity Freddie Wong, who will be featured during the live stream and made a spoofed Super Bowl ad, told Bloomberg. “It’s some capitalist dystopian nightmare.”
The Google-owned video channel is making a play for those who might be looking for edgier alternatives to the main half time show during the big game, and possibly those who may be turned off by the NFL’s controversy filled year.
“It’s a really good place to showcase our celebrities, our talent and our creators,” Suzie Reider, managing director of brand solutions at Google, told Bloomberg. “It will be fun afterwards to see what was Freddie Wong’s draw compared to Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz.”
Even if people don’t head to YouTube for the live stream during the game, the platform is betting they’ll capture those viewers when they watch the ads, real or fake, for days and weeks afterward.
The bottom line: The online video channel is positioning itself as a go-to place for brands even as it competes for ad dollars with other online outlets like Facebook. It intends to leverage its natural advantages as a destination where people already go to consume content, including ads that have gone viral.
“The halftime show falls in nicely with this huge theme for us, which is the notion of brands as creators and the commercial as content,” Reider said. “When you’re an advertiser, your ad sits on YouTube next to a piece of content.”
Data driven marketers, and the audiences they covet, seem to be watching already.