Super Social Super Bowl Ad Awards
By: Shannon Aronin & Dave Kerpen
Given the buzz Pepsi’s Refresh Project generated by NOT participating in the Super Bowl and instead donating ad spend to charity, we expected the Big Game ads to be pretty heavy in social content. Overall, we were disappointed. At nearly $3 million for 30 seconds, what a waste when brands could have done a much better job building an ongoing relationship with their audience. A few Superbowl advertisers were at least using social media during the Super Bowl and talking to people about their ads. These included HomeAway.com, and the US Government Census Bureau, both on Twitter. In terms of social media integration into the ad campaign themselves, a few standout ads made the cut.
theKbuzz Presents:
Super Social Super Bowl Ad Awards
Honorable Mentions: Coca-Cola & Honda
Honda’s Squirrel ad got a lot more attention than the “Who Do You Know” ad they ran in the 3rd quarter – but it was the latter ad that featured a really short screenshot at the end of the ad, of the link: Facebook.com/Honda. While we couldn’t find anyone talking about this (and somehow we can’t even find the ad online today), we believe this was the 1st time any Super Bowl advertiser has used even a precious second to promote a Facebook Page rather than a website- a notable acievement in its own right.
We really wanted to love Coke’s ad for their Live Positively campaign. They get an A+ for effort. But somehow the execution fell flat. They had all the right ingredients: cause marketing on Facebook that donated $1 up to $250,000 to Boys & Girls Clubs of America for every Coke you shared, a sneak peek at the Super Bowl ad on Facebook, and it featured The Simpsons. We expected it to be innovative or hilarious. Instead it was just kind of cute. The “Open Happiness” tagline suggested that a broke Mr. Burns could be made happy, along with the rest of Springfield, just by having a Coke.
3rd Place: Motorola
Start with Megan Fox in a bath tub. As ads go, that’s a good start. Megan tells us that this “little guy” has MOTOBLUR. She goes on to tell us that MOTOBLUR pulls her important stuff and lets her update all of her networks at once with a shot of Facebook on her phone. She then takes a picture of herself and wonders what would happen if she posted it? Watch what happens next for a giggle. But the lesson in this ad is that you need to sell Facebook in order to effectively sell a mobile phone.
2nd Place: Vizio
Vizio’s had the star power of Beyonce and included a montage of what we love about the internet: David After Dentist, Numa Numa Guy, Overly Dramatic Groundhog, (interestingly CarMax seemed to build their ad on this meme too) Twitter, Flickr and of course Facebook. Vizio’s tag line, “The best of the internet on your TV,” sums up the strategy of this campaign.
1st Place: Google
The fact that Google bought an ad at all is buzzworthy.
The online chatter began the day before the Super Bowl when CEO Eric Schmidt tweeted hinting at the ad, saying that “hell has indeed frozen over.” The ad, “Parisian Love,” has been on YouTube for over three months, as explained on Google’s official blog. Undoubtedly, Schmidt’s tweet and subsequent online buzz helped catapult Google to the top of BrandBowl, where it lost only to Doritos, who ran 3 Super Bowl ads to Google’s 1.
The ad is a bit of a tear-jerker. No dialogue at all. Just a demonstration of how google users interact with the product, and how their search capabilities can be life changing. It’s a classic boy meets girl tale, told as only Google can.
Congrats to the most social Super Bowl advertisers! What were your favorite Super Bowl ads and why? And when will television advertisers, Superbowl and otherwise, understand that in order to extend the buzz and effectiveness of an ad, you’ve got to use and integrate social media?
I like your reasoning behind this post, Shannon & Dave. Although I don’t consider their ads social at all, I agree with Brandbowl that Doritos was the winner from the “most memorable” standpoint. Google was the number 2 pick from a memorability standpoint, but it may be because of the comments that I read on Twitter about it (good and bad) that I remember it over some of the others. The amount of chatter on Twitter about the Google Superbowl commercial seem to agree with your assessment that it was the #1 social Superbowl spot.
Got to say for me the most memorable was the Betty White commercial.
I also loved the google ad because it was simple and told a story. But I found it real interesting that they felt the need to run an ad. Tells me they are feeling some pressure from Microsoft and that I think is a good thing.
Totally agree with your pics