Unified Hackathon: Super Bowl Ad Twitter Analysis
Presented by Unified
Smart Social for Smart Marketers. Social Operating Platform for insights, content, and social advertising.
NYC, San Francisco, Chicago.
Smart Social for Smart Marketers. Social Operating Platform for insights, content, and social advertising.
NYC, San Francisco, Chicago.
As part of an internal hackathon, our team set out to measure the best performing advertisements during the Super Bowl as measured by Twitter users' response. We previewed as many of the ads as possible by researching them online prior to the game, and came up with a specific query for each. Queries combined up to 2 officially endorsed #hashtags, the official @handle of the brand featured in the advertisement as well as those of any celebrity endorsers, and up to 5 keywords based on the content of the advertisement.
We monitored Twitter from 5-11 PM EST to provide a concept of the volume of activity before, during and and after the game. Our queries were intended to be overly selective, so while the numbers here certainly don't capture the full volume of all tweets related to the ads, we are confident that the majority of activity we capture was related to the advertisements.
The chart below shows the clear influence of TV advertisements on Twitter users, as we see the activity of each brand spike significantly after each advertisement's air time. Twitter was most enamored with the Budweiser "Puppy Love" ad, consistent with the general consensus online the day after the game.
The Puppy Love ad set Twitter on fire, so much so that it skews the data when the entire timeline of the game is viewed above. We captured over 32,000 tweets in a two minute span, and there were almost certainly many more that we didn't capture. The next best performer was the Transformers movie ad that generated just over 6,800. Almost immediately many celebrities joined in, adding to the ad's reach.
Bud Light was able to expand the lifetime of their tweet pattern by making their advertisement a multi-part vignette, gaining some lift with each subsequent part that aired. The helped them to gain the second largest number of tweets despite having an initial peak lower than other ads, such as Cheerios, Transformers, and Jaguar.
Maserati had only one advertisement featuring the US launch of its lower-priced Ghibli model. Despite that, the pattern of Twitter ads seems to indicate a healthy amount of traffic inspired by the ad.
Pepsi's sponsorship of the Super Bowl halftime show seemed to be an effective one, as they nearly monopolized brand activity during the 30 minute performance by Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Although not well represented by our query results, we did notice a large number of the most influential tweets that came into our system similar to those above, which supported the philanthropic cause of (RED). Either their hearts are in the right place or this was a well-coordinated PR campaign (or both).