Every year the price of a Super Bowl ad goes up. And every year, countless articles are written asking whether the exorbitant fee is worth it for the brands who participate.
Answering that question can be difficult. Many researchers try to do so by polling viewers and consumers to measure things like brand awareness, or willingness to buy. But at the end of the day those surveys can only tell us so much.
In today’s social age, we can measure and track word-of-mouth effectiveness through social media activities related to any TV ad that airs. We can count how many times a Super Bowl ad was viewed online subsequent to its TV airing, we can track social media mentions and shares across various networks, and we can measure search requests for the ad or brand.
By these far more quantifiable measures, it’s clear that Super Bowl ads are most definitely worth the $4.5 million-per-30-seconds they are charging for the upcoming game. iSpot.tv’s examination of the 2014 Super Bowl revealed some eye-opening results.
The 110 ads that aired during the 2014 Super Bowl represented just 0.11% of the 95,000+ ads that ran over the entirety of the year. Yet those handful of ads were responsible for 9.4% of all the total digital activity across all ads over the course of the year. Digital activity includes online video views, social media mentions, and search queries.
Let’s break this down further. Of the 129 million social actions (shares, likes, Tweets, votes, comments, etc.) that took place across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube which can be directly linked to TV ads of any kind, nearly 11% can be attributed to Super Bowl ads. Of the 4.7 billion earned video views for TV ads on YouTube (and iSpot.tv’s network), 7.7% (or more than 363 million) were Super Bowl ads.
No single TV program or televised event comes even close to that kind of effectiveness. The visibility of a Super Bowl ad—from pre-game hype, to game-day airing, to post-game water cooler chatter—massively over-indexes on digital response to the point where measuring them side-by-side would be ludicrous.
When it comes to the NFL season, here are the brands that got the most digital bang for their buck, followed by the individual ads that drove the most engagement
For up to the minute news and data relating to 2015 Super Bowl commercials head over to iSpot.tv’s Super Bowl Ad Center