• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 8, 2010

Twitter and social media have become the water coolers, spitting out data on ads during Super Bowl XLIV. While most football fans munched on chips and salsa Sunday watching the Saints battle the Colts for the championship, marketers and ad agency executives monitored the Web for chatter.

Advertisers that bought spots to air during this year's Super Bowl experienced a massive surge in social media buzz, according to a variety of research and analytic firms.

Bog posts about the Super Bowl rose from 15,702 in 2009 to 25,725 this year, according to research from Initiative's social media strategy and activation business unit Prophesee. The blog posts, more than 3,600 across 57 countries -- from Afghanistan to the United States to Venezuela -- made specific references to advertising, instead of the football game.

These days, more ads begin their life on television and move to the Web. It has become increasingly difficult to figure out how to hook the TV audience and the Internet junkies both in one ad campaign. "Social media has become part of the beginning, the middle and the end of a Super Bowl campaign for marketers," says Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst, eMarketer. "In years past, we gathered around the water cooler and talked at the office about the ads, but it didn't go beyond that. Now one person tweets about something they loved or hated about an ad and it goes out to hundreds or thousands of followers, and they spread it viral from there."

Research firm eMarketer published Monday a series of briefs focused on social media, ranging from best practices to more specific topics, such as what marketers need to know about earned media.

Data collected from social media sites allowed companies this year to more accurately detect sentiment. Google's ad about Parisian love ranked No. 1, with a 98% positive tone in the Pure Ad Buzz category based on tonal ranking, according to Zeta Interactive's Zeta Buzz Super Bowl ad report. Doritos's Don't Touch my Mama/Hands off my Doritos, a 95% positive tone; KGB's Sumo Wrestler/I Surrender, 93% positive tone; Budweiser's Drawbridge/What we Do, 93% positive tone; and Audi's Green Police, 91% positive tone round out the top five on the Top 10 list.

The ads may have generated buzz, but Al DiGuido, chief executive officer at Zeta Interactive, says consumers thought this year's ads fell flat compared with those that ran in 2009. Some of the campaigns carried the same theme as last year, which presented a problem for consumers looking for fresh, new ideas.

Ad and marketing agency execs continually underestimate consumers. "Consumers are more sophisticated, but they started to see the same old jokes and twists in these ads," he says. "People grow bored and tired of those. Marketers and agencies are under pressure to become more innovative, something that Google managed to do. The message was very innovative, creative and simple."

Not all agree that Google's ad deserves the No. 1 spot. Dean Collins, founder at livefootballchat.com, says Google's ad lacked most of the elements that make up a well-developed spot, such as call to action, new product introduction and viral feature. He believes Google could have run the ad at any time.

Guess it depends on how the data gets collected and who shares the insights. In BrandBowl 2010, a first-time Twitter experiment from ad agency Mullen and social media measuring company Radian6, the stats tell a little different story.

"The goal was to measure the volume of discussions on Twitter and apply intelligence to determine negative and positive response," says Rob Begg, Radian6's director of business development for media. "The volume should teach marketers that people are paying attention. They are certainly not afraid to air their opinions. Whether or not you want to believe an armchair creative director, you at least need to pay attention to the voices."

Thousands of people tweeting on Twitter about commercials they viewed during the Super Bowl used the hashtag #brandbowl to help identify the tweets, but also searched for keywords. Consumers rated the Doritos spots featuring chips used as a Chinese throwing stars and a dog that turns on its owner as the most effective. The Brand bowl measured Budweiser Select55 as the least effective brand.

The results based on 98,656 tweets collected from participants ranked the top 10 brands during the game. Rounding out the top five in terms of tweets, Doritos ranked No. 1 with 17,940 posts, 81% positive sentiment; followed by Google: 10,341 posts, 75.3% positive; Focus On Family: 7,248 posts, 71 positive; Snickers: 7,509 posts, 78.8 positive; and Budweiser: 6182, 74% positive.

Universal Orlando, Paramount Pictures, FloTV, Cars.com, Motorola, Diamond Foods-Pop Secret, Honda, Teleflora, Michelob Ultra and Budweiser Select55, were the 10 least effective spots, according to the Brand Bowl.