Here's the Twitter world's take on Super Bowl XLVI: Doritos is the most
popular brand that advertised on Sunday, pizza is the favorite food of
tweeters, beer was the beverage of choice, and broadcaster Cris Collinsworth
was the top on-air personality during the game.
That's the analysis from 640,000 tweets monitored over a five-hour period
Sunday by the Minneapolis ad agency Colle+McVoy.
"This is the social media footprint of the Super Bowl," said Craig
Pladson, Colle+McVoy's director of digital innovation, in an interview Monday.
"This confirms to us that folks are having conversations outside of the
advertisements [they watch]."
Gone are the days when Nielsen ratings were the key measure of success
for a Super Bowl advertisement or whether the spot got a thumbs up or thumbs
down from USA Today.
"The industry is looking for a new metric beyond Nielsen and website
visits," said Marcus Fischer, chief executive of space150, a Minneapolis-based
digital advertising agency. "Brands are asking consumers to take part in a
conversation. They're being sent to Twitter, not the [advertiser's] website."
In terms of brands, Doritos was the top-referenced product for the second
year in a row, according to Colle+McVoy's Super Bowl survey. Doritos was
followed this year by Toyota, clothier H&M, Sketchers and the History Channel,
all of which had at least one ad during the game.
But it was not necessarily a good show for Budweiser, Hyundai, Chevrolet
and Bridgestone. Each of them ran at least three spots and couldn't crack the
top-five brand references on Twitter. "Their spots just didn't resonate or
generate social conversation," Pladson said.
The second-annual Colle&McVoy Super Bowl survey also found that "brands
still struggle" to connect their on-air advertisements to Internet marketing
sites. While 75 percent included their website on the TV spots, only 16
percent included Twitter while just 13 percent included Facebook.
"We thought we'd see more social integration," Pladson said. "We think
that's a miss. It's pretty simple to keep your story going when you are
online."
Fischer said sending consumers to Twitter is becoming commonplace as the
micro-blogging site assumes a greater role in the social network. (Twitter
messages are limited to 140 characters.)
"You've got to keep it easy," Fischer said. "It's got to be designed for
human behavior that is trained to respond to a call to action You've got
YouTube views, Facebook engagement, Twitter followers."
Indeed, Papa John's was the most-tweeted brand of pizza Sunday thanks in
large part to an online promotion that gave its rewards club members a free
pizza if they correctly chose the result of the pre-game coin toss online.
On a related note, the Colle+McVoy survey determined that America's pizza
topping of choice was pepperoni with anchovies as the least favorite topping.
What about the game?
The single biggest tweeting subject during the game was about the teams
-- 44 percent. But fans of the New York Giants out-tweeted New England
Patriots fans 72 percent to 28 percent.
As for consumption during the game, eight in 10 Super Bowl twitters spoke
of beer in social media posts followed by wine at a distant 6 percent and
vodka at three percent. Hangovers got 4 percent of the posts, most of those
late in the game, Pladson said.
"Pizza, beer and the Super Bowl is a definite triangle," he said.
The most mentioned personalities of the game were led by Collinsworth,
who himself is a tweeter, followed by Giants coach Tom Coughlin, Patriots
coach Bill Belichick and broadcaster Al Michaels.
A Super Bowl Twitter timeline can be seen at
www.collemcvoy.com/superchatter/
