It’s one of the most anticipated events of the year, when global brands and performers come together to celebrate Super Bowl Sunday. So which marketing campaigns came out on top, and which moments caused a social media frenzy? 

This year, the price was high for a coveted advertising spot, with companies paying up to a record $5 million for just 30 seconds of time. It’s an understandable price to pay though, with brands knowing that their content will be seen by around 100 million people during the event. And in the lead up to the game this year, brands’ Super bowl teaser ads were viewed more than 374 million times. Of these, Pokemon generated the most success with its pregame release, “Train On”, which attracted 14.9 million organic views and 353,000 social media mentions. The campaign also coincided with Pokemon’s 20th anniversary, and featured its classic characters who are prepared for battle by their “trainers”- those who hold the relating trading cards. In fact, the ad was certainly one of our favourites for its inspiring tagline, “I can do that!” and for stirring up the perfect amount of childhood nostalgia!

Stealing the show this year was insurance company Esurance, who came out on top with their campaign, choosing to run ads before and after the show, taking advantage of these prime viewing times. Even though Esurance wasn’t an official Super Bowl advertiser, the brand stood out for its clever use of social media which they integrated well into the overall campaign. In addition to their advert, the company created a sweepstakes on Twitter using the hash tag #EsuranceSweepstakes, resulting in them becoming the most talked about brand- this hash tag was included in tweets approximately 2 million times. The sweepstakes required Twitter users to retweet Esurance’s tweets, while the company also engaged in real-time, posting FaceTime videos showing when participants had won prizes. Clearly, running a competition in conjunction with its TV ads resulted in the campaign’s unique success.

Another most popular during the event itself proved to be from Doritos, whose series of three ads aired during the big game. These were created by members of the public who participated in the company’s Crash the Super Bowl competition- an annual tradition for Doritos. Each year in the run up to the game, participants are asked to make and submit a 30 second brand video which are then showcased in a gallery, and these can be voted for by site visitors. The three finalists this year had their videos aired during the game, with the winner also taking home a $1 million prize. The winning video, “Doritos Dogs”, was fantastic, making us cry with laughter! The ad features a group of dogs trying to enter a supermarket with a “No dogs” policy, in order to buy packs of Doritos. After many unsuccessful attempts, the group finally disguise themselves in human clothes so they are able to make their purchases. The competition is a clever move on the company’s part, effectively allowing them to cut their ad production costs, while adding crowd-sourcing and public traction to the mix. And the amount of engagement and popularity from the competition resulted in Doritos generating the largest increase in Twitter followers in comparison to all other brand advertisers.

During the course of this year’s game, there were more than 960,000 posts shared about the events on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, with the high volume of mentions attributed to top brands and performers. Aside from Esurance, Pepsi also took a top spot in terms of the number of mentions, achieving 486,000 tweets by the following Monday morning. Meanwhile, Beyonce was the most tweeted about performer, generating an incredible 147,000 tweets per minute during half time, and a staggering 2.6 million tweet mentions in total.

Did you follow the action on social media during this year’s game? Which were your favourite marketing campaigns and ads? We’d love to hear your thoughts as always, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share your comments on our Facebook page.