Commentary

Budweiser Won The Social Super Bowl

  • by , Staff Writer, February 2, 2015

The King of Beers was also the undisputed king of social media among Super Bowl advertisers, according to data from MediaPost’s Digital Engagement Index, powered by social analytics outfit ListenFirst. Over the course of Super Bowl Sunday, Budweiser’s official accounts garnered over 5.1 million engagements across its major social platforms, followed by Nationwide with just over 3.2 million engagements, Coca-Cola with 3.2 million, Geico with 2.1 million, and BMW with 1.9 million. Rounding out the top ten were T-Mobile, with 1.8 million engagements, Snickers with 1.79 million, Mercedes-Benz with 1.7 million, Mazda with 1.65 million, and YouTUbe Squarespace with 1.63 million. 

Not surprisingly, for all the top ten brands the vast majority of engagements came from YouTube, as people went online to see ads again, or for the first time. Budweiser’s impossibly sentimental “Lost Puppy” ad got over 4.9 million views on Sunday, bringing it to a total of 21 million views since it was first released last week.

Nationwide’s dual-pronged ad strategy certainly produced interesting results, as its lighthearted ad starring Mindy Kaling garnered a mere 300,000 views on YouTube, while its weirdly upsetting ad featuring a ghost boy recounting the life he never got to live has attracted over 1.5 million -- perhaps from people wanting to confirm that it really was that big a bummer.

Among other social platforms, Twitter and Facebook dominated the remaining digital engagements on Super Bowl Sunday, with a few notable exceptions. The highest volume of Facebook engagements went to Budweiser -- with 72,469 posts, comments and shares -- while the winner for Twitter engagement went to Coca-Cola, with 235,284 brand-related tweets (hopefully not hateful, considering its positive vibe message). Interestingly, the big winners on Instagram were two automotive brands, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, with 272,097 and 366,468 Instagram engagements on game day, respectively.

Brands were trying hard to push viewers to social media this year, with Marketing Land reporting that half the commercials (28 out of 56) featured hashtags for social networks, with Facebook mentioned in four commercials, and Twitter mentioned in three. However, as the huge skew toward YouTube indicates, Facebook’s attempt to become a major destination for Super Bowl ad-watching didn’t exactly pan out.  

1 comment about "Budweiser Won The Social Super Bowl ".
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  1. Ashleigh Verdier from ABB, February 2, 2015 at 3:14 p.m.

    I think we need to not only consider the number of engagements but the sentiment of them. Budweiser has been the talk of my social media feeds since last night, but it's all been negative. Their "hard-work" ad we incredibly offensive and hypocritical to the craft beer industry. I happen to be a craft beer nerd and have yet to see one positive comment about Budweiser or even any mention of this puppy dog commercial they also ran. My point being that just because people are talking about Budweiser doesn't mean the "won" anything, all I see is a lot of people saying they'll never buy a Budweiser (AB InBev) owned beer again.

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About the Author

Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.