So, twelve days later, has someone shared a Super Bowl ad with you yet? This week? Today? Has the buzz died where you work?
At least, streaming video has made it easy to see a
favorite commercial over and over again, and that must help ease the pain an advertiser feels after paying $4 million to show up for what amounts to fleeting glance on Super Bowl Sunday.
This
year’s game didn’t seem to have much carry away, ad-wise. Consider the commercial for Wonderful Pistachios, featuring Gangnam Style star Psy. According to
Unruly’s Video Viral Chart, which we also cited after the game to look at how well the Super Bowl ads would be shared online, Psy’s silly new pistachio dance attracted only 57,284 shares,
from its 2,702,749 views – a share rate of 2.1%. (Before we go all negative, the ad still was viewed online more than many Super Bowl spots, just not by Gangnam Style multiples.)
The world has seen one-hit wonders before, of course, but seeing Psy’s fade sort of hurts. He’s a novelty act that I think got that way not just because of the
vigorously loopy video, but because of his pint-sized Korean being. Mostly we were laughing at him, not with him, which Wonderful is finding out.
On the flip side, there’s the
commercial for Ram Trucks, which got shared like a good stud. With no pre-game hype, its ‘Farmer’ ad got a lot of
publicity, because of its use of the late Paul Harvey’s homage to the strength of character of the folks who work the land.
Some hated that (MediaPost’s Barbara Lippert, for one), but others didn’t. It was the second most
shared ad of Super 2013 (1,653,238), giving the brand the highest average share rate of any Super Bowl advertiser (22.4%).
An odd offshoot of this commercial and online mania was that many
people came away supposing the commercial was for the Dodge brand. But Chysler made Ram its own stand-alone brand a couple years ago,
a point that was largely lost on people, unless perhaps, they’re rugged farmers who read marketing magazines. But subsequently that made for a lot of weren’t-we-stupid stories at news
outlets confessing they never knew of the re-branding. So maybe Dodge...er, Ram, won big.
But not as much as Budweiser, the ad that has been most shared online.. The day after the Super
Bowl, Unruly said the “Brotherhood”
commercial already had 5,5 million views and 1.5 million shares (though Budweiser released it a few days before the game.). But by now “Brotherhood– which Unruly says is the 14th
most shared ad of all time, and third most-shared Super Bowl ad – has attracted 2,087,488 shares and nearly 12 million viewers . That’s still a long way’s off from
Volkswagen’s 2011 commercial, “The Force,” which has the Super Bowl share record of 5.57 million, but it’s a good indication that maybe a $4 million Super Bowl commercial buy
can be a long-term investment.