Viewers snoozed through the first half of Super Bowl XLVII: The Baltimore Ravens were inexplicably blowing out the San Francisco 49ers, and the ads—many of which had been thoroughly teased in the weeks leading up to the big game—didn’t offer many surprises. But the partial blackout in the third quarter changed everything. With broadcasters forced to make football small talk for 34 minutes, brands flexed their social strength and took to the Twittersphere. Among the three fastest “newsjackers,” reports bloggers at Marketing Land, were Oreo, sending out a “you can still dunk in the dark message” via Instagram, and a “We do carry candles” tweet from Walgreens. And Audi took the opportunity to poke competitor Mercedes-Benz, and its Mercedes-Benz Superdome, the likely cause of the power outage: “Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now...” One @Phillyadman took the opportunity to run a custom blackout Twitter ad for Tide: “We can’t get your blackout. But we can get your stains out,” according to MediaPost’s #adhuddle feed. Of course, the blackout also gave the 49ers a chance to shift the game’s momentum, making advertisers who made third- and fourth-quarter ad buys look like sports Einsteins. “The ads were like the game, in that they started slow and picked up steam at the end. The ads in the second half greatly outperformed the earlier ones, “ says Steve McKee, president of McKee, Wallwork & Company, an Albuquerque, N.M., ad agency which has been running AdBowl since 2002. His agency sponsors AdBowl, an event that allows voters to rank their favorite spots. McKee’s favorite? “The Dodge Ram farmer spot, which was voted No. 1. It was an anthem, and a statement. Chrysler is one of those advertisers that chose to keep its powder dry and not pre-release the spot, and I think that was a good call for them. And I love how different it was from their previous ads. It didn’t try to make a sequel to the Clint Eastwood or Eminem ad. But it was still in the same spirit and really well done.” In a twist, this year the agency turned its Ad Bowl into a Kitty Bowl, having the ads face off against cat videos. “Cats are the most popular videos on the Internet, except during the Super Bowl. So we thought this would be fun,” he says. (Not to mention a nice paw swipe at the Puppy Bowl.) And in early voting, while ads dominated the top three spots, cats took two of the top 10 places, “proving a homemade cat video can be just as effective as an ad that cost millions to make.” (Voters also had a chance to make an online contribution to the Animal Humane Society of New Mexico.) After the Dodge Ram ad and the second-ranked Tide Miracle Stain ad, with Joe Montana in topiary, the most popular ads were Budweiser’s baby Clydesdale, Coca-Cola’s Security Camera, Kia’s Space Babies, Audi’s Prom Spot, Oreo’s Whisper Fight and Jeep’s Whole Again. Two highly anticipated spots, Samsung’s hilarious two-minute Galaxy commercial and the Mercedes-Benz introduction of Willem Dafoe as the devil, failed to make the Top 10. But Volkswagen and its buzzed-about "Get Happy" ad ruled the war of the tweets, generating a score of 86,000 of them, as measured by BrandBowl. (Developed by Mullen, Radian6 and Boston.com, that contest calculated the number of positive and neutral mentions a brand had in the weeks leading up the game, minus the negatives.) Bud Light gathered the most overall chatter. And Taco Bell's rabble-rousing seniors earned the most love, followed by Doritos, with the Dodge Ram Farmer spot coming in third.
The maker of entertainment guide and discovery app NextGuide, Dijit Media Inc. announced it is in the process of acquiring GoMiso, maker of the Miso, SideShows and Quips apps, which enhance TV viewing. Dijit says it will continue to support both the Miso app, which enhances TV content, and SideShows, which identifies actors, fashion and other aspects of on-screen content. Quips, which pulls quotes and image grabs from TV content for social sharing will be discontinued. GoMiso founder Somrat Niyogi will act as an advisor to Dijit. In its announcement, Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman says “this acquaition will give us more tools to give our users a guide experience that redefines how people discover content. Dijit’s NextGuide app taps into the broad range of multimedia on demand and broadcast channels, from the TV grid to Amazon, Netflix and Hulu premium services and iTunes to personalize media recommendations and discovery. NextGuide so far has emphasized content discovery rather than synchronized, enhanced experiences. This acquisition give Dijit technology and a footprint in that second-screen world. GoMiso was among the earliest entrants in the “second screen” app category that tries to enhance or guide TV and multi-screen experiences. The founders said on their company blog that the Miso and SideShows apps and their community of users will live on under Dijit. They claim to have been among the first to use media “check-ins” and to offer synchronized second-screen experiences. The acquisition is another sign that second-screen apps are maturing into a new phase of possible consolidation and partnership. After a protracted courtship Viggle walked away from merger plans with GetGlue. UK entrant Zeebox penned a partnership with Comcast that allows the app to act as a remote control for cable boxes. With the most lucrative medium yet invented in play, the social TV space is already mightily cluttered with startups, white-label solutions serving networks and show producers and platforms like Twitter now moving more aggressively to stake a claim to all the second-screen activity that goes on across devices.
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.
Viewers snoozed through the first half of Super Bowl XLVII: The Baltimore Ravens were inexplicably blowing out the San Francisco 49ers, and the ads—many of which had been thoroughly teased in the weeks leading up to the big game—didn’t offer many surprises. But the partial blackout in the third quarter changed everything. With broadcasters forced to make football small talk for 34 minutes, brands flexed their social strength and took to the Twittersphere. Among the three fastest “newsjackers,” reports bloggers at Marketing Land, were Oreo, sending out a “you can still dunk in the dark message” via Instagram, and a “We do carry candles” tweet from Walgreens. And Audi took the opportunity to poke competitor Mercedes-Benz, and its Mercedes-Benz Superdome, the likely cause of the power outage: “Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now...” One @Phillyadman took the opportunity to run a custom blackout Twitter ad for Tide: “We can’t get your blackout. But we can get your stains out,” according to MediaPost’s #adhuddle feed. Of course, the blackout also gave the 49ers a chance to shift the game’s momentum, making advertisers who made third- and fourth-quarter ad buys look like sports Einsteins. “The ads were like the game, in that they started slow and picked up steam at the end. The ads in the second half greatly outperformed the earlier ones, “ says Steve McKee, president of McKee, Wallwork & Company, an Albuquerque, N.M., ad agency which has been running AdBowl since 2002. His agency sponsors AdBowl, an event that allows voters to rank their favorite spots. McKee’s favorite? “The Dodge Ram farmer spot, which was voted No. 1. It was an anthem, and a statement. Chrysler is one of those advertisers that chose to keep its powder dry and not pre-release the spot, and I think that was a good call for them. And I love how different it was from their previous ads. It didn’t try to make a sequel to the Clint Eastwood or Eminem ad. But it was still in the same spirit and really well done.” In a twist, this year the agency turned its Ad Bowl into a Kitty Bowl, having the ads face off against cat videos. “Cats are the most popular videos on the Internet, except during the Super Bowl. So we thought this would be fun,” he says. (Not to mention a nice paw swipe at the Puppy Bowl.) And in early voting, while ads dominated the top three spots, cats took two of the top 10 places, “proving a homemade cat video can be just as effective as an ad that cost millions to make.” (Voters also had a chance to make an online contribution to the Animal Humane Society of New Mexico.) After the Dodge Ram ad and the second-ranked Tide Miracle Stain ad, with Joe Montana in topiary, the most popular ads were Budweiser’s baby Clydesdale, Coca-Cola’s Security Camera, Kia’s Space Babies, Audi’s Prom Spot, Oreo’s Whisper Fight and Jeep’s Whole Again. Two highly anticipated spots, Samsung’s hilarious two-minute Galaxy commercial and the Mercedes-Benz introduction of Willem Dafoe as the devil, failed to make the Top 10. But Volkswagen and its buzzed-about "Get Happy" ad ruled the war of the tweets, generating a score of 86,000 of them, as measured by BrandBowl. (Developed by Mullen, Radian6 and Boston.com, that contest calculated the number of positive and neutral mentions a brand had in the weeks leading up the game, minus the negatives.) Bud Light gathered the most overall chatter. And Taco Bell's rabble-rousing seniors earned the most love, followed by Doritos, with the Dodge Ram Farmer spot coming in third.
The maker of entertainment guide and discovery app NextGuide, Dijit Media Inc. announced it is in the process of acquiring GoMiso, maker of the Miso, SideShows and Quips apps, which enhance TV viewing. Dijit says it will continue to support both the Miso app, which enhances TV content, and SideShows, which identifies actors, fashion and other aspects of on-screen content. Quips, which pulls quotes and image grabs from TV content for social sharing will be discontinued. GoMiso founder Somrat Niyogi will act as an advisor to Dijit. In its announcement, Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman says “this acquaition will give us more tools to give our users a guide experience that redefines how people discover content. Dijit’s NextGuide app taps into the broad range of multimedia on demand and broadcast channels, from the TV grid to Amazon, Netflix and Hulu premium services and iTunes to personalize media recommendations and discovery. NextGuide so far has emphasized content discovery rather than synchronized, enhanced experiences. This acquisition give Dijit technology and a footprint in that second-screen world. GoMiso was among the earliest entrants in the “second screen” app category that tries to enhance or guide TV and multi-screen experiences. The founders said on their company blog that the Miso and SideShows apps and their community of users will live on under Dijit. They claim to have been among the first to use media “check-ins” and to offer synchronized second-screen experiences. The acquisition is another sign that second-screen apps are maturing into a new phase of possible consolidation and partnership. After a protracted courtship Viggle walked away from merger plans with GetGlue. UK entrant Zeebox penned a partnership with Comcast that allows the app to act as a remote control for cable boxes. With the most lucrative medium yet invented in play, the social TV space is already mightily cluttered with startups, white-label solutions serving networks and show producers and platforms like Twitter now moving more aggressively to stake a claim to all the second-screen activity that goes on across devices.
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.