John Carter Super Bowl Ad – was it always Disney’s plan to air 30 sec version? Or did something happen?

When the Disney John Carter ad played during the second quarter of the Super Bowl, it was a thirty second ad with 18 seconds consumed by a slow zoom out on the title as a montage of images played. Yes, there was a “find the hidden code” promo going on and the montage (actually more of a collage) clearly had something to do with that. But there’s been a lot of discussion in the aftermath about the efficacy of a 30 second spot with that much of it consumed by the title.

Here is the 30 second version:

Almost immediately the “extended version” was released online — but never played during the Super Bowl. Here is the extended version, in which the 18 seconded allocated for the title zoom out are not as much of an issue:

So, was it always Disney’s plan to have it play as a 30 seconder in the Super Bowl?

Or did something happen in the ad rotation that had an impact on the situation.

A pal in the ad biz who was live blogging at the time had this to say.

First — this is what he posted when it first appeared:

Injuries killed this…

Super Bowl ads have to be played in a certain order. JC had a GREAT spot near the beginning of the game. BUT, it was a during an injury time out for Travis Beckum… so with the odds of them having to cut back to the game, they had to go with 30 second commercials.

Theoretically, they’ll have show it again later in the game, since a 60 second ad was paid for. Otherwise, this was a horrible bad luck call.

Then later, in post mortem mode, he posted this in response to a question about how he was sure about what happened:

Super Bowl ads aren’t aired randomly. They’re also broken down so that you don’t get the same type of commercial in each break. It goes something like beer/movie/snack. One commercial in each break will be the minute long one. Each ‘anchor’ commercial has a 60 and a 30 second variety. It’s why when you see them after the game in normal programming, there is a shorter version, more digestible for the “2 and 2” format of commercial breaks. While there are TV time-outs (why the Super Bowl takes forever, as they double the number compared to a regular season game), there are times when the game is interrupted unexpectedly–injuries and instant replay delays for instance. When they do this, the programmers have no idea just how long it will take, but they’re given by the NFL at least a 90 second window where they’ll cut away for commercials. The JC commercial got aired in order, but it happened ‘as scheduled’ during an injury time out. So, they had to go with the 30 second one to get all three ads in.

If the injury happened earlier, the Battleship commercial would have been cut down. If it had happened later, then Avengers. I’m still wondering why it didn’t get a replay…

I’m not sure if I buy this completely, but at this stage, I want to buy it.

Does anyone else have any info on this?