Five million dollars is enough to purchase a 30-second Super Bowl ad, but it’s not enough to ensure it will be a hit with the right audience.
Like any communication, Super Bowl commercials are subject to rules that govern the success, failure and proliferation of this high-risk, high-reward communication.
In the case of this highly anticipated communication, brands need to follow three rules: humor, scale and follow-through. How do we know?
From 11:00 p.m. ET on Saturday, February 6 to 11:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, February 7, we used Cision Global Insights to analyze more than 200 million tweets related to the Super Bowl’s commercials. The messages were collected through detailed Boolean search strings and further filtered by industry. This includes comments about elements of the ads, characters found within them and the campaign hashtags.
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Based on these results, forward-thinking brands can adhere to these three rules of Super Bowl commercials:
1. Humor: Puppy-monkey-baby crushes the competition
Doritos is a perennial Super Bowl performer, consistently creating viral campaigns. Though Super Bowl 50 was no different, another brand outperformed the cheesy chip brand.
Mountain Dew created this year’s most viral ad, a terrifying creation centering around a hallucinatory puppy-monkey-baby, a single being made up of three creatures that individually have been characters in the Super Bowl’s most popular commercials.
It is better to just watch the ad than have it described.
Top 10 ads
| Brand | Twitter Mentions* | |
| 1 | Mountain Dew | 4,200,000 |
| 2 | Doritos | 1,690,000 |
| 3 | Amazon | 1,600,000 |
| 4 | Budweiser | 1,470,000 |
| 5 | Coca Cola | 1,440,000 |
| 6 | Hyundai | 1,119,000 |
| 7 | Pepsi | 971,000 |
| 8 | Taco Bell | 940,000 |
| 9 | Apartments.com | 880,000 |
| 10 | Jeep | 516,000 |
2. Scale: Established brands have an advantage
Larger brands with longer histories of social media activity, or larger followings, have an advantage over new brands entering the space. When you invest in a prestige advertisement (any large spend marketing effort), you need to understand your competitors’ positioning.
A new entrant has figured this out: Amazon, with its ad featuring Jason Schwartzman, Dan Marino and countless other celebrities. Commenters on Twitter mentioned the ad more than 1.6 million times.
Amazon is one of the largest brands in the world, and it has the money to invest in award-winning creative, content licensing and brand partnerships that allow them to produce ads of such high quality.
Before entering a brand space, ensure your brand is scaled appropriately to engage in the space and reap the benefits of heightened exposure.
3. Follow-through: Integrated marketing a must!
Squarespace took a different approach. Rather than engaging its audience via Twitter, they created a unique campaign related to the commercial they aired with comedians Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele, otherwise known as Key and Peele.
Its commercial encouraged the comic duo’s fans to visit squarespace.com/realtalk, where Key and Peele provided live commentary of the game as their outspoken characters.
The catch was, legally, Key and Peele couldn’t advertise their livestream as “Super Bowl commentary” or anything that had to do with “football” for that matter.
Instead, they replaced the names of the teams, divided up the word “football” into “foot” (pause) “ball” and used other hilarious workarounds with the help of a live, sit in-lawyer.
Why all the fuss? Squarespace creates beautiful websites that any user can design and implement. Rather than spend time driving people to Twitter, they hosted and drove people to the livestream on squarespace.com, built on one of its templates – a beautiful way to show off its work, increase time on the site and drive new leads.
Image via Pixabay: 1
