Superbowl commercials: It’s not how you start it’s how you finish

While it seems most people have moved on from the Superbowl, I’m sticking with it. Monitoring YouTube engagement a couple of weeks down the line shows some interesting things are happening. Without the driver of TV, the engagement with ads is changing in notable ways. The chart below shows the growth in views, likes and dislikes over two weeks. For most ads, there’s a marginal increase in the number of views and an roughly equal increase in both likes and dislikes. But there are some notable exceptions.

1. Mobile Strike Super’s Arnold’s Fight has seen a massive increase in views. On Feb 12th, it had 51% the views of the number one commercial (Hyundai’s The Chase). Now it is at 90% of it’s total views! That’s around a million more views while the Chase has risen just 200,000.
2. Colgate’s Every Drop Counts has seen a massive 238% increase in views over the last two weeks compared to the average of 117% for all Superbowl ads.
3. People are growing to dislike Pokemon. It’s seen a 114% increase in likes but a 172% increase in dislikes.

Superbowl Commercials: The game in numbers

Along with my class at the University of Nottingham, I’ve been looking at the recent Superbowl adverts. Not being American/interested in NFL, we were interested in the engagement with the YouTube videos of the ads rather than the broadcast versions. The Superbowl commercials are a microcosm of the best and most expensive creative executions. But do they drive audiences to engage with brands?

This is incredibly hard to measure, of course. But we can look at the social media stats for an indication. Looking at the viewing figures from the first week, it seems to me that there’s a real “superstar” economy at work in adverts. The few standout ads, really outperform the rest.

In terms of overall views, this morning the most viewed ad had 24,116,618 views (Hyundai). The least viewed had  6,153 (McDonalds). As this chart shows, there’s a steady decline in between.

However, YouTube has a decent enough measure of the success of an ad – at least an indication that the viewer ‘likes’ it – through its like/dislike buttons. Generally, there’s a positive association at work between views and likes (indicated by the straight line on the graph below).

Put simply, the more times an ad gets watched the more times it gets liked. But this positive association is really driven by five standout performers who really drag things up. These, I would argue, are the superstars from the big game. They are (in order of most liked):

#Pokemon20: Pokémon

First Date:  Hyundai

Coke Mini (Hulk vs. Ant-Man): Coca-Cola

Puppymonkeybaby: Mtn Dew Kickstart

Ryanville: Hyundai

 

 

Tesco: The ideology of basket dating

In the 1960s and 1970s social theorists were in agreement: advertising not only promoted specific products but also promoted a way of life (commonly called “consumerism”). The idea, put very simply, was that advertising presented some overaching messages. For example, it always presented the consumption of new products as the solution – no matter what the problem was. Ugly: buy make up. Hungry: buy a burger. Thirsty: Buy a Coke. Lonely: buy a car.

This type of analysis seems glib and outdated now. This is, for the academics out there, another way of saying top marketing journals don’t publish this kind of argument. It seems too left wing. But I think this Tesco ad is a prime target for a return to “ideology critique”.

Here we see consumers with a problem: they are lonely. The answer is not to buy something to make them happy. But to trust Tesco to analyse their shopping habits to find them the perfect partner. The subtle subtext of this ad: we know what you want better than you do.

It is entirely possible for Tesco – or more, accurately, Dunn Humbly their data provider – to match individuals based on buying behaviour. Tesco doesn’t do this for its customers. It used the data for targeted promotions and behavioural nudges (think, “How can we get people to buy more processed food/fags/alcohol?”).

I would love to see an ad showing these processes and discussions. Instead we get a silly execution with some strange “Matchmaker/Psychotherapist” who can – supposedly – figure out people’s age and sexuality from one basket. Fortunately, all the people involved have model-good looks, otherwise this might be hard to believe.

Badvertising rating: pathetic.

Science fiction and science fact

It is worth remembering that despite all the silicon valley hype about machines and analytics solving the world’s problem – the driving force behind most developments is business. Perhaps more specifically, the part of business few people want to critically analyse: marketing.

With this in mind, I just read this on Campaign magazine:

“A report from Accenture even reported that “marketing is so inextricably linked to technology that, by 2017, chief marketing officers are projected to spend more on information technology and analytics than chief information officers”.