While I didn’t have the opportunity to watch the number one US sporting event of the year live, the 2009 Super Bowl has certainly provided a plethora of case studies into how offline and online advertising are converging, and continue to bring new light into how we interact and even define social media. With advertisers spending on average USD$100,000/second, online data with the right analysis can deliver some understanding into what all the fuss is about and why, even in difficult economic times, these spots continue to attract top dollar.
Take for example the New York Times ‘Twitter Chatter’ tool, which very neatly mapped the tweets by location and frequency of commonly used words in Super Bowl messages, particularly chatter about the ads. It’s interesting to note the progression of just how much the marketing associated with the event has become almost as important as the event itself.
If Twitter is one barometer then certainly YouTube is another. YouTube set up a dedicated channel called AdBlitz 2009 where users could vote on their favourite ads. Winners from this vote included Doritos in the number one spot with their “Free Doritos” ad, E*TRADE with it’s singing babies and CareerBuilder.com’s “When to find a new job” ad in the top three.
Doritos also appear to have gained a whopping 80% bump in search volume compared to the period leading up to the Super Bowl according to Google’s Insight for Search tool, no doubt supported by their open approach to their marketing which invited Doritos aficionados to ‘Crash The Super Bowl’ by creating ads – the winner got to take home a cool $1million.
While this is all very interesting, advertisers are continuing to try to harness the data to provide insight into just what the return on investment from social media exercises may be. The Groundswell Blog featured one methodology which compared the Tweets of approximately 70 people in relation to a brand and attempted to marry those to the comments the ad incited – be it positive or negative to come up with a sort of ‘net promoter’ score.
No doubt there are plenty of other fascinating tools that have been developed by advertisers and interested spectators alike, all very likely to be reporting any number of different results as to who the real winners from Super Bowl advertising investments were. As marketers continue to navigate within the social media landscape more and more ways to measure these interactions will continue to develop. Until then, it certainly is fun to post analyse, and there is much that can be learned from the experiments of others in applying to your own brands advertising impact online. I’d love to hear if you’ve come across any other interesting ways to analyse social media, Super Bowl related or not.
