The Real Winner of the Super Bowl: Google

• Feb 10th, 2010
• Posted by admin
• Posted in Google, Radian6, Social Media, Super Bowl, Twitter, Who Dat?

It’s undeniable that the Saints and the people of New Orleans were the real winners of Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIV, but there was also a different battle being waged— not on the gridiron, but in 30 and 60-second intervals between stints of athletic prowess – the commercials.

Yes, the storied Super Bowl commercials were out in full force again this year, aiming to bring laughter, thought, and that sudden urge to reach for one’s wallet through the TV screen and into the real world. Where typical Nielsen ratings and surveys drop off, the world of social media will step up to fill the data void.

Using Radian6, we tracked Tweet volume of the top brands using a combination search of “Super Bowl” + “Brand Name” and here’s what we found . . .

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Chatter surrounding Google’s first-ever television venture, dubbed “Parisian Love,” overshadowed that of even the second-place finisher, Doritos, which ran more than four ads total during the game.  Brands such as Audi, Bud Light, GoDaddy.com, and others saw continued success via the buzz and heightened talk around their brands in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl. One advertisement that got a good deal of attention around the Web but didn’t translate into quite as much of an actual reaction on game day was the Focus on the Family 30-second piece featuring Heisman Trophy winner/ Florida quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother Pam Tebow.

Looking at brand mentions on game day, we were able to expand beyond Twitter to blogs, forums and other social sites to pull in brand mentions from a wider spectrum. The numbers collected go on to back up their heightened ranks in the Twitter mentions and show that those ads deemed important enough to tweet about were also important enough to be shared through other social media tools. The numbers broke down like this:

In order to see how the discussions moved through other social media channels, we widened our search for a period of 72 hours after the game and found some interesting aftershocks that we attribute to a second wave of users seeing and talking about the ads.

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Likewise, you can see the downstream effects of social sharing in the number of brand mention and YouTube video views for some of the most-popular ads. The Super Bowl ad game isn’t just a one-time impression number in the days of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, but instead is a game of staying power and resonance with users.

Audi clearly benefitted from the long-tail discussion of their Green Police spot in the days following the Super Bowl as it jumped in the rankings and pushed Tebow’s Focus on the Family spot off the top five.

So, while the Saints may have taken home the Lombardi Trophy, Google can sit back and enjoy their social Web win with their first foray into television advertising. Not only did they see the largest volume of Tweets the day of the game, they also saw the largest aftershock in the following days.  In fact, for every tweet mentioning Google since the Super Bowl, they also received .7 discussions via blogs – that’s a pretty good rate.

So– well done, Google. But we already can’t wait for next year . . . who knows, maybe the answer to “Who Dat?” will be the Seahawks.