Tech Tuesday: Super Bowl Social Analytics: Tide Wins and the Eagles Soar

For marketers, one major fascination with regard to the Internet is the massive quantities of data that they get to sift through. When you're on a sophisticated website like Amazon.com these days, your every move is tracked, analyzed, backtracked, dissected and anticipated. Smaller companies may not have the same level of sophistication as the big kids, but you can be sure that if a company is spending money online, they're paying attention to numbers of one kind or another.

The ability to measure activities in your own website is not that difficult, even if knowing what to do with that data is a bit more complicated. When it comes to the larger universe of Internet data though, there's a lot more info to scrape and crunch, and where do you find it?

Talkwalker, founded by Luxembourg Boy wunderkind Thibaut Britz, has emerged to offer its services to help companies get a handle on the effectiveness of their brand marketing activities. While it's fresh in our minds, let's take a look at some of the intriguing numbers surrounding this weekend's Super Bowl.

The fact that it was a great battle, a real nail biter that pit an underdog never-done-it-all Eagles team against the totally dominating, never-say-die Patriots, that squeezed blood pressure levels to the very last seconds of this super thrill-ride.... well, that kept people from turning the channel, so nearly every marketing exec was grateful people were still watching at the end. In short, there were plenty of stats to measure in the Battle of the Brands.

First, let's not forget that every football franchise is likewise a brand. The Eagles took the Vince Lombardi trophy. We all saw Monday's headlines. But who led the scoring when it came to social media mentions? Despite New England's dominance the past dozen years, the Philadelphia Eagles scored more than 50% more mentions than the Pats, 1.4 million to 804 thousand. For the record, hashtag SuperBowl scored 5.3 million mentions Sunday in the Big Three social media networks, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. (Courtesy Talkwalker.)

Star Power @ Halftime 
Evidently Justin Timberlake is a bigger sensation than I've realized. Timberlake had a million mentions, which was near 200K more that the Patriots. I guess that Halftime Show Selection Committee earned its stripes again this year.

A Global Event
As everyone knows, the Super Bowl has become an international event, as these Talkwalker stats affirm:
- Brazil - 186.8K mentions
- Mexico - 172.1K mentions
- UK - 147.7k mentions
- Canada - 129.1K mentions

Battle of the Brands

When all was said and done, if I were a gambling man I would have said Tide won this one. Sure enough, Talkwalker confirmed that Tide received 163.8K mentions during the Super Bowl. I loved what they did with their concept that if you see a clean white shirt, it's Tide. In fact, when the Persil ad came on near the end of the second quarter, I half thought that it was a clever Tide ad, that there would be a twist at the end, like an O Henry story. I'd never heard of Persil before, so maybe it was brilliant for them to have a Super Bowl ad and get the name out there. Maybe. I did check out their website and, yes, it is a real company that makes laundry detergent.

According to the data, the Mountain Dew & Doritos joint ad featuring a rap battle between Morgan Freeman, Peter Dinklage, and Missy Elliot was mentioned 115.1K times. Super-well done, it was hot. I mean, cool. I mean, you know what I mean.

I don't know what the numbers were for the Dodge Ram ad in which Vikings come all the way across the seas of time to their Viking in the Twin Cities. Upon arrival they see a sign that the Patriots and Eagles are playing, so they pull a U-Turn in their Ram pickup to head home. I'm sure everyone in Minnesota enjoyed it. I did. The Ram marketing team was clearly aiming for relevance. Unfortunately, their attempt with that Martin Luther King, Jr. speech hit a sour note. My immediate reaction was that this was not an appropriate appropriation, to use the Civil Rights leader to pitch trucks. Sure enough, Talkwalker data confirmed what my instincts told me. Of the 11.5 thousand mentions, most were negative. Here's but one example.
 
Trending #SelfieKid
In the middle of all the Halftime Show hoopla Justin Timberlake paused to have his pic taken in a young fan's selfie. The #SelfieKid hashtag had more than 11.4K seemingly instantaneous mentions.

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For what it's worth, I love Twitter as a social media tool. If you're not into Twitter, it might be because you don't really understand its power. Then again, that's another story. I say the same thing about Dylan.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Engage it.

RELATED LINKS
Speaking of Numbers: Just How Big Was The Minnesota Super Bowl
Best and Worst Ads from Sunday's Big Game
Talkwalker Home Page