Sure, the Denver Broncos outlasted the Carolina Panthers in an ugly defensive struggle to hoist the Lombardi Trophy in Santa Clara last night, but who won the $600 million battle for your attention? The answer is not what you think.
With commercial time on yesterday's Super Bowl going for nearly $5 million for a 30-second spot, brands were counting on a big social boost from fans sharing and talking up their ads. Unfortunately, it's been notoriously difficult to correlate earned media from social shares with paid media during a real-time event. But now there are new analytics tools, including one that I used last night from iSpot.tv to live-blog the "brand bowl" by tracing the impact of each ad on social as it aired. Today we've got final tallies of the big winners.
Welcome to the Social Bowl. Here's how big a footprint we're talking about.
- 64 brands accounted for 98 spots (including 28 program promos, 6 movie title and 4 organizations) in Super Bowl 50.
- Super Bowl 50 spots and previews leading up to the game accounted for 476 million overall video views. On game day alone, there were over 62 millionviews.
- Fans performed over 1.5 million social actions (tweets, likes, shares, comments, etc.) engaging with Super Bowl 50 ads during the game. Overall, there have been 5.8 million social actions tied to Super Bowl 50 ads.
What was the score? Here's how brands and spots did on social overall during the game.
- Hyundai won overall share of voice on Game Day. All together, the brand's spots, including the popular "First Date" with Kevin Hart, helped the Korean car maker garner 13% of all earned digital activity, with 130k social actions and 4.7 earned/organic online views.
- Mountain Dew's characteristically weird "PuppyMonkeyBaby" spot captured nearly 13% of the game's social response on its own, generating 244.6k social actions and a total volume of over 272 million impressions, with over 2.25 million organic views on Game Day alone. That propelled Mountain Dew to a #2 overall finish in brand share of voice at 12%.
- T-Mobile (11% SOV),
Budweiser (5.4%) and Doritos (5%) rounded out the top five. - Honorable mention goes to Esurance, whose "Pass It On Sweepstakes" spot promised millions in prizes to fans for retweeting the company's hashtag and message. 16 winners were selected in real time during the game. As a result, social engagements spiked when the spots ran during the first and fourth quarters of the game. The lesson here: "pay them and they will Tweet!"
So Who Won? In the same way that Super Bowl 50 host city Santa Clara, California reaped the windfall of having the game in its stadium even though the home team San Francisco 49ers didn't even get a whiff of the playoffs this year, the real winner of this year's social bowl was...
Facebook.
Think about it. Who really benefited from all that traffic? Certainly Twitter and Google's YouTube got their share, but it was Facebook that really flexed its muscles. And here's how.
Of the 62.4 million online video views that all spots received on Game Day, more than half - 34 million - went through Facebook. Let me say that again: on the biggest day for video sharing of the entire year, Facebook got more traffic through its new(ish) native video feature than YouTube.
Overall, in the days leading up to the Big Game, YouTube still has the edge, clocking 244.3 million (128 million organic) views to Facebook's 232 million. But Facebook views show up directly in the timeline, making them harder to miss and more intimately wrapped in the social persona of each user.
Last night's game might not have been one for the history books in terms of quality of play, but make no mistake. In the social arena that now spells success for advertisers, the game just changed in a big way.
