• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, February 4, 2013

As countless media outlets and opportunistic startups count user votes and try to declare ad “winners” and “losers” in yesterday’s Super Bowl, one brand dominated them all because it was present in many of the ads good and bad -- Twitter. According to MarketingLand’s count of hashtag and Twitter mentions, 26 ads during the game itself had a Twitter reference compared to merely 4 that aimed people at Facebook, one to Instagram and one to YouTube. Google+ got no love last night from advertisers.

Hashtag counter Matt McGee notes that Twitter increased its mentions 300% over last year, when advertisers only mentioned it 8 times.

Twitter also became the place where fleet-footed brands capitalized on the stadium blackout that hit at the start of the second half of play. Oreo planted a photo with the headline “You Can Still Dunk In The Dark” attached to the post “Power Out? No Problem.” Audi needled rival Mercedes Benz with the Tweet “Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now…” Finally, Walgreens tweeted reminders that they sell candles and lights.

Twitter’s own advertising team posted a note claiming “It took just four mins after the lights went out for the first Twitter advertiser to bid on [power outage] as a search term.” The Twitter ad team also crowed that it had been mentioned in half of the Super Bowl ads. At least one major Super Bowl advertiser, Calvin Klein, also made use of Twitter’s latest entry into the mobile app world, the video clip sharing app Vine. The company posted a well-cut man exercising his abs in CK undies.

Twitter posted this morning that in all 24.1 million tweets related to the Super Bowl were posted apart from the ad hashtags. “By the beginning of the second half, the volume of Tweets had already surpassed last year’s Tweet total,” the company reports. The power outage proved to be the height of conversation, with 231,000 tweets per minute, but it was outpaced by mentions of Beyonce during the halftime show.  

The Super Bowl win for Twitter plays right into the micro-blog’s marketing plan. The company has been much more aggressive of late in promoting to media programmers and advertisers its role as a channel for discussion around TV. For the recent Golden Globes Awards, Twitter promoted its own second-screen experience by assembling “Twitter-sanctioned” celebrity Tweeters and offering behind-the-scenes content at a #goldenglobes hashtag.