This year’s game may have been unusually thrilling, but the fact of the matter is that most people tune in to watch the Super Bowl for the ads (and an excuse to gorge on beer and chips). For this year’s event a number of groups tapped into Twitter to try to get a real-time perspective on how each ad fared. One of the more impressive reports was put together by SocialMedia, an advertising network that focuses on social networks. Their report, called the TweetBowl, plots the number of tweets relating to each commercial over time, allowing us to easily see which commercials were the most popular, and which had the most staying power.
It’s impossible to use the total number of tweets as a a direct measure of each brand’s success – some companies ran multiple commercials, while others had their videos more widely distributed so no single link got the most attention. But it’s still easy to spot some trends. For instance, it looks like this Bridgestone Tire ad had a relatively good initial response, with nearly 400 tweets in the five minutes after it aired. But the number of tweets surrounding the ad dropped precipitously only a few minutes later. In contrast, GoDaddy’s shower ad spiked at nearly 600 tweets immediately after its commercial aired, with a relatively high number of tweets continuing for at least the next 30 minutes.
The SocialMedia report claims that Hulu ultimately won the TweetBowl, though it didn’t even come close to having the most number of Tweets:
So, why hulu? They didn’t have the most tweets. But they also didn’t have seven commercials. And, not only was their commercial great, hulu.com/superbowl was the #1 shared link across all companies by a large margin. So, combining what was arguably the best commercial, ownership of the most frequently shared link, and the fact that they serve up all the other commercials in addition to their own makes Hulu a pretty easy choice for champion.
This doesn’t seem quite fair to me – Hulu had the number one shared link because it was streaming all of the Super Bowl ads (which even had their own ads). But even if we are comparing apples to oranges, Hulu clearly had a big day – another survey called the Twitter Bowl (details here) ranked Hulu as the second best ad, narrowly missing the top spot after getting edged out by Transformers.