Study: Doritos and Skechers Super Bowl ads garner most buzz on social media sites

by Aida Ahmed of The Daily Campus

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Although the ads aired on Sunday night, viewers have continued to comment on them since.

This year’s Super Bowl was filled with the unexpected. Inclement weather, Christina Aguilera fumbling the words to the national anthem, and of course, the commercials.

Whether it was to support their team or watch the Black Eyed Peas at halftime, more people watched this year’s Super Bowl than ever before. According to Nielsen ratings, Super Bowl XLV was the most viewed telecast in broadcast history with 111 million viewers.

This comes as good news to advertisers who spent up to $3 million on one 30-second Super Bowl commercial. But have you wondered which commercials create the most buzz, what commercials really get people talking around the country?

SMU advertising students Kate Elpers, William Webb, and Kathryn Vinod set out to find which Super Bowl commercials were mentioned the most on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. In their project, part of Professor Steve Edwards social media marketing class, the students tracked responses to 52 different ads on sites like FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Buzz in the 24 hours after the Super Bowl.

“Advertisers develop buzz around social media,” said advertising professor Steve Edwards. “A couple ads even solicited action by customers, like GoDaddy.com. I think the more outlandish and strange, the more we’ll see things on social media.

Working with the CEO of MutualMind, Babar Bhatti, the students captured almost half a million tweets and posts.

Bhatti, who started MutualMind two years ago, said this is the first time he has conducted this kind of survey.

“We used a proprietary tool in real time analysis to gauge positive and negative feedback,” Bhatti said. “The idea was to find which ad got the most buzz and find where the buzz is coming from, how long it lasts and the volume of the buzz.”

After they received the results the students then ranked the ads based on the pure volume of comments, as well as conducting a sentiment analysis which indicated the percentage of favorable comments.

Commercials for brands such a Doritos and Groupon made the list in the top 10 most mentioned Super Bowl commercials mentioned on social media sites.

So what did they find?

The commercials for Doritos, Skechers and the Motorola Xoom were the top three mentioned on social media sites with 64,261 posts on the Doritos commercial. A little over a third were positive comments.

Number two on the list, Kim Kardashian’s Skechers commercial was mentioned 55,597 times but a majority of the feedback was negative. Almost 30 percent of the comments were negative while 25 percent turned out to be positive.

Commercials for Suzuki, Planters, and Royal Caribbean were each mentioned less than 100 times online, falling to the bottom of the list. Although they were mentioned the least, comments on these brands were almost all positive.

One thing the students found was that although the ads aired on television Sunday night, viewers have continued to comment on them on various social media sites. What was once a topic for the water cooler at work on Monday, now is a continuing dialogue that includes people around the world. Student researcher and SMU advertising major Kate Elpers says this is the new trend in advertising.

“Many of the commercials encouraged viewers to go online and preform an action,” said Elpers. “They are no longer just SuperBowl commercials, they are now commercials that start a conversation in social media.”

So regardless if the public reaction was positive or negative, Super Bowl ads have people talking, online.

“The opportunities for advertising have dramatically increased over the past couple years,” Elpers said. “Some say that traditional types of media no longer hold as much importance due to the movement online.

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