A ton has been written about the ways marketers integrated - or didn’t integrate - social media into their Super Bowl campaigns this year. We've seen a lot of data that will help drive marketing decisions around next year's big game. In the post-Super Bowl aftermath, everyone wants to know how social integration in Super Bowl ads helped increase buzz and results.
Buddy Media analyzed a sample of 44 Super Bowl commercials and 34 associated Facebook Pages (some brands ran more than one ad during the game, which accounts for the discrepancy). We analyzed the Pages at the time the brand’s Super Bowl commercial ran, and then again at 8:30 a.m. on February 7, two days after the game.
As was expected, brands that did integrate social media into their Super Bowl ads saw the highest engagement boost. Of the 34 Super Bowl advertisers that ran at least one Super Bowl ad, nine referenced Facebook in at least one of their commercials.
Those advertisers that mentioned Facebook experienced a 61% higher growth rate than brands that did not reference the social network. Notably, the ad for Marvel's The Avengers, which had a large Facebook call-out, saw the second-highest incremental fan growth and third-highest growth rate.
OK, we get it, you’re likely thinking. Including a Facebook mention on-air did lead to a boost in engagement online. But what about the content of the ad? What types of content worked best? Well, celebrity-themed content pulled out an underdog victory over sex-themed ads when it came to boosting Facebook fan growth.
Fan growth for brands featuring celebrities in their ads was 2.6X higher than average and 4X higher than sexually themed ads. Themes were not mutually exclusive, so ads may have fallen into two categories.
Based on the impact celebrity ads had on Facebook fan growth, it’s certainly an added “social” bonus for brands that spent money on celebrity endorsements.
This is the third part of our Super Bowl data analysis. Part one focused on keywords surrounding the Super Bowl, and part two analyzed performance of the New England Patriots' and New York Giants' Facebook Pages.
