And The Winners Are ... Super Bowl Ad Metrics

Okay, so Hank, one of Anheuser-Busch's endearing Clydesdales, stole about 97 million hearts. And more people than you'd imagine like to see how a stock-trading baby spends coin. And creepy animals got plenty of work: Shrieking squirrels, Alice Cooper's python, homicidal rats, killer giant pigeons, racist pandas and disco lizards all joined forces to make the Super Bowl ads even more animated than usual. (And that was before Charlie Brown beat out Underdog and Stewie for a Coke.)

But the clear winner in this year's Super Bowl adfest was the booming business in ad metrics: Heck, this year, USA Today's Ad Meter was even referenced by name in a Hyundai spot. Of course, there's also the Wall Street Journal's rankings, and Adbowl, an online vote. And for the first time this year, Hey! Nielsen, the online division of Nielsen, tracked the buzz generated by the spots in real-time, via a focus group of consumers who responded throughout the game.

As with the other polls, Bud's Hank the Horse was the big winner, followed by Coke's Parade Balloons, Diet Pepsi Max, Fed Ex's pigeons, and Pepsi's Justin Timberlake. Audi came in as the most buzzed-about car ad, and CareerBuilder.com, often a Super Bowl darling, sank with its walking human heart, coming in a lowly 40th place.

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Coming in dead last, in Nielsen's rankings, was SalesGenie.com, which some participants pronounced racist.

Even real-time bloggers got measured. Collective Intellect, a social media tracker, followed blogs during and after the game, and found that Pepsi had the most share of voice in blog posts during and after the Super bowl with 22%, followed by Bud with 21% and then Audi with 14%.

It found that the e-Trade baby produced the most positive sentiment with 80%. The Planter's nut perfume spot was "surprisingly positive, with 54% favorable sentiment," it says, while Carmen Electra turned people off in a big way. Her Hershey's Ice Breaker commercial had a 75% negative sentiment overall.

Collective Intellect also found that while "pre-releasing ads or leaking information did give the companies spikes before the Super Bowl, it didn't necessarily translate into buzz during/after the game." Both Pepsi's silent ad, which aired pre-game, and GoDaddy's ad got plenty of pre-game buzz, "but neither of them did well relative to other advertisers."

And Adbowl.com-in its eighth year measuring spots-drew 3,600 registered voters so far, up from last year's 2,800, says Steve McKee, president of McKee Wallwork Cleveland, which runs the site. This year's winners, not surprisingly, are those that won the other polls, albeit in a slightly different order: Bud's Clydesdale Team, Bridgestone Tires' Scream, Coca-Cola's It's Mine, Fed Ex's Carrier Pigeons and E*Trade's Clown.

What struck McKee most this year, he says, is how just one Budweiser spot dominated and so many "new or returning advertisers did well. Planter's and e-Trade and Tide all came in strong, and I think spreading the wealth in the Adbowl is a good thing."

To McKee, who pioneered Adbowl back in 2000, the year's duds were Taco Bell, Carmen Electra's Ice Breakers ad, and Unilever's Sunsilk. "And I liked the Tide spot-it really worked: It was so annoying to listen to, but that's the point--your stain talks louder than you do."

And meanwhile, as the ads go viral, viewers can watch them on both MySpace and YouTube, tracking the number of views and comments they garner.

Looking for more Super Bowl numbers? Nielsen says the Fox broadcast, which drew a 97.5 million viewers, set a record for any Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, while the New York Giant fans kept rejoicing, Boston.com offers an entirely different metric: At mid-day, "sad" was the word 25.6% of New England Patriot fans chose to describe their feelings, followed by numb, (21.1%) philosophical (18.8%) drained (14.5%), ashamed (11.1%) or angry (8.9%).

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