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Super Bowl Social Activity Reaches New Heights, But Brands Fail To Capitalize

Over the years, the Super Bowl has evolved from the must-see event for sports fanatics, to a cultural phenomenon of sorts. Now, football fans or not, consumers across the country tune in to the Super Bowl to catch the latest ads from brands and, of course, the half time show.

This year’s Big Game brought in the highest ratings for any Super Bowl to date, garnering a 49.7 rating in 56 metropolitan markets across the U.S., according to Nielsen. The Associated Press indicated that this stat means nearly half of homes in those areas were watching the game.

On Facebook, up to 65 million people talked about the game, with 265 million individual posts, comments or “likes,” according to the social network. Viewers generated approximately 28.4 million tweets throughout the game, a 14% increase over the 2014 Super Bowl.

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The spike in social activity potentially reaffirms what all brands and advertisers believe: The Super Bowl can be a prime time to capture eyes and dollars. This year, there were 56 ads dispersed throughout the game’s entirety. Each 30-second ad cost approximately $4.5 million, and commercials between 45 seconds and a minute cost up to $8 million, according to Nasdaq.

The top five most-mentioned brands on social media during Super Bowl XLIX, according to Salesforce, were:

  • Budweiser (22% share of social buzz);

  • Nationwide (17% share of social buzz);
  • Skittles (7% share of social buzz);

  • Doritos (5% share of social buzz); and
  • McDonald’s (5% share of social buzz).

In terms of brand sentiment, Doritos, Budweiser and McDonald’s skewed most favorably.

On the over end of the spectrum, Nationwide was hit with a barrage of negative feedback for its Super Bowl ad. Up to 64% of the social updates regarding the commercial were negative, according to research from Amobee Brand Intelligence.

To boost social activity and buzz, half of the 56 ads touted hash tags. But what impact did these tactics have on word-of-mouth and overall marketing effectiveness?

Not much, according to analysis from Jeff Rohrs, VP of Marketing Insights at Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

“The average time a hash tag was on screen during a Super Bowl commercial was less than one second,” Rohrs explained. “Not even the most adept texting tweenager can capture and type a hashtag that fast. But only GoDaddy, Wix.com, and the marketing brains behind The Kingsman movie seem to understand that. They were the only ads in which a hashtag appeared on screen for the entire ad. Otherwise, only Budweiser (#UpForWhatever) and Procter & Gamble (#LikeAGirl) leveraged well-established, pre-existing hash tags in their ads.”

Rohrs also argued that Super Bowl advertisers failed to engage mobile consumers who were using their devices to update social networks during the Big Game. He indicated that more ads contained phone numbers than calls-to-action to download mobile apps or engage via text message.

“In order to generate direct results from a TV commercial, you must ask the viewer to do something specific on their device,” Rohrs said. “You can’t take a customer on a journey with you unless you prompt the first step.”

Want to see the Retail TouchPoints team’s feedback on Super Bowl Ads? Click here to access the blog.

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