This Sunday will be a first for the Super Bowl. In the game’s 48 year history, this will be the first Super Bowl that is played in a cold-weather, open-air stadium. For football purists, it is about time. Enough with the suntanned crowds with their fashionable short sleeves, sitting in their luxury seats, sipping on expensive wine. Football is a blue-collar sport meant to be played out in the elements of winter.

The cold weather game is not the only first. In many ways, this is a first for Super Bowl Commercials as well. The telecast of the Super Bowl has always commanded the highest advertising dollars of any TV show throughout the year. This year a 30 second spot costs $4 million. But the price of releasing your commercial early via social media has eclipsed the TV spots. It was reported that carmaker Jaguar paid a whopping $5 million to Google for ads to let viewers know about their TV ad. In other words, they made an ad for their ad! They are not alone. This year more than any other, Super Bowl ads are being put on YouTube weeks before the big game. Ads for brands such as Audi, Volkswagon, Budweiser, Axe, M&Ms, Butterfinger and Doritos have been leaked via YouTube before we even knew which two teams would be playing this Sunday. Leaked may not be the correct term for what has happened. The early release is part of the overall campaign now. If you were to do a Google search for Super Bowl Commercials, you would find that there are several paid ads at the top of the first page, all with the YouTube links to the new crop of ads that will run on Sunday.

There was a time when Super Bowl ads were kept under the strictest code of silence. You might get a teaser ad out early, but marketers were counting on the wow of seeing the ad for the first time to keep viewers in their seats during time outs. People had contests for their favorite Super Bowl commercials. You could even wager a bet in Las Vegas for the best commercial. All of that changed with social media. The early release has been spurred by the use of social media. It was reported that last year, 265 million people viewed Super Bowl commercials on YouTube. That is over 2.5 times what was viewed the year before. And one third of those views came before the kickoff.* This year has promise to eclipse those numbers.

But the use of social media in Super Bowl commercials is not limited to what is happening prior to the game. Take a look at the way the ads will entice viewers to take an action step via social media after the commercial. Marketers will try to keep the viewer engaged past the 30 second spot with an invitation to like, tweet, follow, and view more. Expect that engagement to keep perpetuating itself. With the new media and the obscuring of the old lines between search engines and social media, expect that any such connection you make via social media will be followed up with countless ads to engage with the brand again. It is part of a strategy to define your likes and dislikes so your particular tastes can be advertised to specifically. And in this way, Super Bowl ads have changed. No longer is the advertiser just after your attention for 30 seconds, they want to drop a cookie on whatever device you are using so the ad campaign can come back to you over and again.

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*How Google Gets Its Piece of the Super Bowl Ad Blitz, by Kyle Stock, Bloomberg Business Week, January 27, 2014