Live sporting events are among the few remaining places where advertisers can ensure that no one advances quickly in their commercials, which is why companies were willing to pay $ 5.5 million for just 30 seconds of air time on Sunday. Super Bowl.
So, who “won” the Super Bowl advertising war?
For the past two years, I’ve been using the University of Tennessee’s Adam Brown Social Media Command Center to understand how social media like Twitter and Facebook reacts to big events like presidential debates, breaking news like the GameStop craze and sporting events like the Super Bowl.
Twitter involvement is a measure that companies use to determine the success of an ad and whether it was worth all those millions – not to mention the cost of making Super Bowl ads, which generally include celebrities.
Here’s what I noticed monitoring social media during Super Bowl LV.
The performers
I didn’t monitor the game itself – in which Tom Brady led the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a 31-9 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs. But I noticed that the artists, including the first poet to perform at a Super Bowl, received a lot of comments.
The performance of the Weeknd break – and his closeup – was what was said on Twitter, as the performance of the Super Bowl is usually. With its prime time and assembly of the greatest successes, was the biggest hit on social media, with more than 821,000 mentions during the game, most of which were quite positive.
Poet Amanda Gorman, who gained national recognition in the possession of President Joe Biden, received almost 60,000 mentions that were extremely positive after she read a poem during the pre-game show.
Amanda Gorman recites “Captains’ Choir.”
Drake, Disney and Dew
Of the dozens of companies that bought advertising time during the big game, three won Twitterverse with the most commented positively about the ads of the night.
I came to that conclusion by analyzing the volume of tweets that mentioned the company or used a hashtag introduced in the commercial, as well as examining the sentiment score to see if the conversation about the ads was positive or negative.
One of the big winners was the State Farm ads starring Drake, in which the rapper appears as a replacement for “Jake”, who appeared frequently in the insurer’s ads. More than 28,000 tweets mentioned State Farm in 40 minutes after the commercial’s first showing, for a total of 44,000 during the game. “Drake” was a keyword in most of them. The feeling was very positive for most of the night, as people found “Drake from State Farm” funny, until some users brought the “Drake curse” which is supposedly bad luck for sports teams.
“State Farm Drake.”
The Disney trailer for his upcoming series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” performed even better, generating more than 100,000 tweets that specifically mentioned the show. The feeling was also extremely positive for the show that starred two characters from the Marvel universe, with a score of over 90% over the night.
The Mountain Dew ad featuring professional wrestler John Cena driving through a “watermelon-themed surreal amusement park” won the night on social media. It received more than 300,000 mentions, probably driven by the $ 1 million offered to the first person who tweeted the correct number of bottles of “important melon” that appeared in the ad.
Mountain Dew’s million dollar offer.
Some failures
Budweiser, the mainstay of the Super Bowl, had a really bad night. At first, he said he would not buy advertising this year and would instead donate the money to coronavirus vaccination awareness efforts. But apparently he changed his mind and ran several ads for Bud Light and Bud Light Seltzer. Mentions to the two beers were below 10,000 and sentiment was negative after the ads started running.
Shift4Shop, an e-commerce platform, announced its partnership with the Inspiration4 civilian mission to space. The announcement did not appear to have much impact on Twitter users, however, with less than 2,000 tweets during the game – which did not affect the price much. It reminded me of Quibi’s announcement at last year’s Super Bowl, which was supposed to be the premiere of the TV streaming app to the world. It was not well received, and the company gave up in December.
Another big loser was the ads that were “heavy” – advertising jargon for commercials that are overly emotional, like those that reference important events like the pandemic or the Capitol riots. Most Super Bowl advertisers avoided these themes – opting for escapism and nostalgia. And those who weighed in did not do well, like the Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s ad, during which the narrator intoned that “in these difficult times, we need nature more than ever”.
The Jeep ad, starring Bruce Springsteen, attracted a lot of attention – 20,000 tweets just minutes after it aired after the break – but most of them were negative. For two minutes, the chief begs the Americans to “meet in the middle” in a call for the unit that some Twitter users have described like “deaf to tones”.
Too political?
Honorable mention
Although it didn’t break into the Internet, the ad for vegan food company Oatly, whether you love it or hate it, received a lot of attention, given how minimalist it was.
It featured the company’s CEO playing the piano in a field and singing about Oatly products. People seemed equally divided over whether the ad was good or absolutely horrible – but generated over 16,000 tweets. The negative reaction may have been the company’s plan all along, as it immediately started selling T-shirts saying, “I totally hated that Oatly ad.”
The shirts sold out in five minutes.
Alexander Carter, PhD student in advertising, University of Tennessee
This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.