This morning, Reprise Media released our 6th annual Search Marketing Scorecard on the Super Bowl, which ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence in search and social media –measuring how prepared each brand was to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl advertising investment. The Search Marketing Scorecard is the longest-running study of its kind.
The audience for this year’s Super Bowl was primed and ready for integrated campaigns. According to a recent comScore study, 1/3 of the 90 million people planning to watch the Super Bowl expected to log on to their computers during the game. Furthermore, One out of every ten viewers (or nearly 9 million people) were going to use their computers specifically to seek out advertiser websites. That sounds like an audience that’s not only interested in the ads, but interested in having real interactions with brands, which is what our study is all about.
So how did this year’s advertisers do?
This year’s scorecard (which can be viewed by clicking the thumbnail to the left) saw the crowning of three rookie advertisers, as Boost Mobile, HomeAway and Google scored integrated marketing touchdowns in their first Super Bowl outing. The spots were joined in the win column by multiple-time champion E*Trade.
EDITOR’S NOTE: While it didn’t factor into the scoring in any way, it also didn’t hurt that Boost Mobile (with their Tim & Eric directed remix of the Super Bowl Shuffle) and Home Away (with the triumphant return of the Griswolds!) had two of my favorite ads of the night.
Furthermore, Denny’s, which rated a Fumble last year during their Free Grand Slam Breakfast promotion, turned in a solid performance, which bumped them up a few levels to a First and Gold advertiser – room for improvement, but a marked improvement over last year when their website crashed due to a lack of server capacity on the night of the game. (Rule #1 of cross-channel integration… make sure you can handle it if your stuff goes TRULY viral). This year, the restaurateur’s screaming chicken-related landing pages loaded quickly, pointing users to more info about the hugely successful promotion.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, PopSecret/Diamond Nuts was hard to find on the night of the Super Bowl – surprising given their pre-game promotion about using search and social to connect their campaigns. They were joined in the Fumble category by Dockers, Dodge Charger and Intel.
We also saw the return of a strategy we like to refer to as ad drafting, where companies not participating in the Super Bowl pull a judo move, buying keywords relating to their competitors and using their own energy against them. The most egregious of these drafters? Turbo Tax, who seemed to be buying every single keyword related to the Super Bowl that we could think of. They were visible for most brand names, generic super bowl keywords and more. Honorable mention goes to Pepsi (who were buying Coke related terms), and both Monster & Careerbuilder, who once again bought each others’ brand names and taglines in an effort to poach resumes and job hunters from the super bowl market.
Want to know more about the best in integrated marketing campaigns from the Super Bowl? Stay tuned to this blog over the next few days, as we dig into more of the data around our analysis to provide some useful trends and best practices. We’ll also be sharing some data from our partners at Trendrr, who provided conversation monitoring for all Super Bowl adds over the past few weeks.
And don’t forget to sign up for our upcoming Super Bowl webinar, which will be held on Feb 19th at 2pm. We’ll review all the winners and losers from this year’s Big Game, and provide analysis on what actually happened with all that buzz once users went online.
What did you think? Did you see any campaigns that you thought did a particularly good job integrating their messages cross channel?
