• by Tameka Kee , February 5, 2008

PepsiCo's Super Bowl ad for its revamped Pepsi Stuff consumer rewards program featured Justin Timberlake, "Saturday Night Live" references and movie-style special effects--but the creative elements took a backseat when Interpublic's Reprise Media named Pepsi as the best-performing brand in terms of an integrated search, social media and Super Bowl strategy.

The Pepsi Stuff campaign snagged most valuable player status on the search firm's annual Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard because it nailed the goal of having consistent on- and offline messaging. The TV spot and Pepsi's various Web sites (including a microsite and branded YouTube and Facebook channels) all contain the same calls-to-action--driving users to sign up for the Pepsi Stuff program.

In addition, Pepsi's search team purchased a myriad of keywords related to the TV spot, going beyond obvious branded terms like "Pepsi Stuff" or "Pepsi Super Bowl commercial" to snag viewer interest around pop star spokesperson Justin Timberlake. The "Pepsi Stuff" tagline also ranked high in the organic or non-paid search results--evidence that the search team had been given enough time to optimize the microsite in advance of the Super Bowl.

"Pepsi was the hands down winner," said Joshua Stylman, managing director at Reprise. "They did a great job in having visibility through search and social media, and it wasn't thrown together in the last minute. They also made sure that the Web sites were crawled in advance and took advantage of all the relevant keywords."

And while Web-based companies like GoDaddy, Cars.com and CareerBuilder all also scored touchdowns, Reprise found that it was harder for CPG, entertainment and automotive brands to craft fully integrated campaigns.

In all, less than 30% of all advertisers used the same terms and words from their TV spots in their ad copy, only 26% of advertisers included a call-to-action on their Super Bowl landing page, and just 7% of advertisers purchased keywords related to their celebrity spokespersons.

Meanwhile, Audi's Godfather-inspired spot sparked a strong search interest, and the automaker backed it up by having a good paid search presence--but the landing page malfunctioned shortly after the ad ran. "They pulled the ads once they realized the page was broken, but it was still a big missed opportunity," Stylman said. "You can bet there was someone there to make sure that the TV commercial went off without a hitch," Stylman said. "And there's not a lot of resource required to make sure that a Web site is up and running, so I'm not sure how that happened."

And while almost half of all 2008 Super Bowl advertisers had an official YouTube page or social networking profile--not one of them made mention of their presence in the TV spot. "My sense is that advertisers are still most comfortable living inside their own four walls," Stylman said. So while brands may recognize the value of social networks, they're not quite ready to spend a few precious seconds of their million-dollar spots calling attention to it.

The search firm's research into the past four years of Super Bowl ads also yielded insight into how deeply advertisers are beginning to integrate their on- and offline campaigns for the big game. For example, this year some 84% of all advertisers included a URL in their ad. That's 30 percentage points higher than the 54% that drove traffic to a Web site during the 2005 Super Bowl.