Super Bowl Ads Impact In Search
Well Super Bowl 2018 is done and dusted, but the real winners on the day may very well be the top ten brands that spent big during the half time break. A week on from the big occasion I sorted through some data to see what effect mass market advertising had on certain brands and any lessons we could learn.
What I learned
• Social media ‘followers’ and ‘likes’ are a sound metric for results
• Use Google Trends to measure brand growth after advertising
• “Australia” spiked – but maybe not for the right reasons
• Odd media can be a great opportunity for “news-jacking”
• Amazon is still top dog
Resources
Adage Super Bowl Article On Advertising Winners
David Meerman Scott On Newsjacking
Transcript
Hey, welcome back, Rankers. I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about the TV ads on the Super Bowl last week, because we’ve got a little bit of data around it now. It’s interesting to see the impact of that sort of mass market advertising, what it has on brand, and what things it may bring out for you to have a look at and work on in the future. This is an article in Ad Age and it’s really good. Some data that’s been compiled by, I think it was, ListenFirst Media.
Top 10 Super Bowl Brands
What they have done is, they’ve gone through and looked at all the top 10 brands that were advertising, and they’ve put together a scorecard based on who’s gained the most followers, and likes, and all that sort of thing, which I think is not a bad metric to go on, when you’re measuring something like TV advertising, because let’s face it, it’s better than the systems they’ve got in place now, which is like, “Yeah, we think this many people watched.” But at least here is some concrete data, some real data about what people have actually done, as opposed to, “Oh, your ad was screened in front of X million people when half of those might have been off getting a beer or going to the loo. Might have been a dog that was watching, who knows? But this is real data. So this is a great article in Ad Age.
I’ve just taken these same brands, and I’ve gone through and I’ve put them inside Google Trends. This first one is the United States, over the last seven days. We’re measuring Lexus, Jeep, Pepsi, and Toyota. I know Pepsi’s a little bit of an odd one out, but I’ll show you why I’ve got that in there in a second. Now you can see here, this is Super Bowl day, and what I’m looking for is, did growth happen after the fact? I think you can say with Lexus, you have the ad here, and there is a steady growth period after that. Time will tell, but we need longer than seven days. We probably need a month to see what effect, if any, this had for the data to flatten out.
Certainly Jeep had the biggest interest on the day out of these four brands, anyway. I’m gonna come back to this one because there’s a brand that’s missing here, and I’m gonna pop it in just to show you the scope of the power of one particular brand. Then we’re gonna have a look at Wix ,and I always just throw up a little bit in my mouth when I say Wix, no offence. Then we’ve got Groupon, who was actually quite huge. God knows, I don’t know what they advertised. I didn’t go and have a look, but it was quite popular on the day.
Sorry Australia, You’re Not a Country
Australia was very popular with their Crocodile Dundee parody ad. I looked at the Australia spike and I thought that’s really good, and it seems to have continued. It seems to have dropped off a bit, and then bang, and now it’s come back here again. I’m thinking, “Oh, why does it come back here again?” Then I’ve scrolled down to look for related queries, and the rising ones. The rising ones will give us the most recent ones that are starting to give us a trend. We got this SNHU Australia, which I worked out is the Southern New Hampshire University, and they’re going to Australia. I’m thinking, “Why? Have they got one opening here?”
When I went and investigated further, I found what actually happened was is because a professor failed a student there, because he claimed that Australia wasn’t a country. If I was Tourism Australia, I would be all over this. As David Meerman Scott says, “This is a perfect opportunity for news-jacking.” Even though they’ve done this great commercial here, there’s been this other spike that’s just happened in the last couple of days, where they really need to get their social media teams all over this. Maybe they are, I don’t know. But certainly, there’s a lot of interest in there, and all the phrases that are related. There’s some Super Bowl ones, and some Chris Hemsworth gets one mention, but most of it’s about that professor saying that Australia is not a country, and subsequently, people Googling to find out if we are indeed a country. Look, we don’t have our own head of state, but yes, technically, we are a country.
I just want to show you this brand, just to put things into perspective for you. I’ve got Lexus, Jeep, Pepsi, and Toyota, and the other one that advertised was Amazon. Kind of gives you some perspective, right? Even though the numbers that we’re all looking at a couple of weeks ago might have been a little bit rubbery and dodgy, certainly they are the very, very biggest gorilla on the block, when it comes to retail, and online shopping in the US. Every indication is that’s what’s going to happen here as well.
Hopefully that is helpful. If you have something you want us to cover, then please let us know, and we’ll see you next week. Don’t forget to subscribe, and if you’re a blogger, head over to bloggersseo.com for some free advice, and free SEO. See you soon, bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
