Everyone has their opinions about Super Bowl ads, but the story goes deeper with research companies attempting to determine the impact of the ads on consumer marketing.
Reprise Media’s 4th Annual Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard, which ranks advertisers on their integration between their TV spots and their presence in search and social media, said Pepsi, CareerBuilder, GoDaddy, Cars.com, T-Mobile and Tide performed best, while Disney, Zantac and Hershey’s performed poorly, “with nearly no connection between game-day ads and their online presence.”
The report said only six percent of Super Bowl advertisers gave a call to action in their commercials and no advertiser mentioned its social media presence on MySpace, YouTube or Facebook. Less than one-fifth showed Super Bowl related content on social networks. Meanwhile, advertisers are getting better at including relevant urls in their ads, with 84 percent displaying them in their TV spots, with all leading to the right landing page.
Peter Hershberg, managing partner of Reprise Media, said, “In an increasingly fragmented media world, the Super Bowl represents the last of the true mass-marketing opportunities. The buzz created by an audience that large can cause huge spikes in online behavior. Marketers that overlook search and social media are missing out on a huge opportunity.”
comScore’s post-game survey ranked the top ads. Anheuser-Bush’s Bud/Bud Light ads were the most popular, with 49 percent saying they’d like to see them again. Pepsi (28 percent), Coca-Cola (25 percent), FedEx (18 percent) and Bridgestone (17 percent) followed.
The survey also measured the online impact of the ads. Thirteen percent of viewers watched a Super Bowl ad online after the game and 13 percent visited an advertiser’s website. Of those viewers, 38 percent went to GoDaddy.com, 22 percent went to Coca-cola.com and 21 percent to Pepsi.com.
