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Which Companies Wasted the Most Money on Super Bowl Commercials?

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Re: Which Companies Wasted the Most Money on Super Bowl Commercials?

#22

I'm not sure how well this metric works for Supercell and Clash of Clans. I sometimes play that game, and I can tell you that during the Superbowl, there was an in-app notification sent to all it's players to watch the youtube ad, which greatly increases the number of views of the ad beyond what the other company ads could do.

Yea, that surprised us that Clash of Clans was #1, but figured it was something to do with it being a mobile product. #2 is Budweiser though.

Re: Which Companies Wasted the Most Money on Super Bowl Commercials?

#23
post #20

Recalls a SB ad years ago, during the original Internet bubble: E-trade showed a dancing monkey, then the text "Well, we just wasted two million dollars. What are you doing with your money?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQMq5wtZcg Gotta wonder what that cost them in lost business (you gonna invest with a group that brags about throwing money away?).

Gotta wonder what that won them in new business (you gonna invest with a group that had an add people were talking about more than a decade later?).

Kinda amazing they still are producing Super bowl ads. I'm guessing they're not spending too much on production with babys and cats.

Re: Which Companies Wasted the Most Money on Super Bowl Commercials?

#24

Coke's #makeithappy campaign ended up being pulled thanks to an effort by Gawker, that's gotta have some marketing folks upset. Here's wondering if the gossip mongers like Nick Denton might have to pay the price for their tomfoolery. http://www.jta.org/2015/02/07/news-opinion/the-telegraph/whe...

I thought Coke's commercial was a great response to last year, when there was such a backlash against including a gay couple in their advertising.

It's one thing for 4chan to come in and ruin the day, but for an actual company with actual managers and employees to ruin another company's advertising campaign by quoting Hitler? That's crossing a line, unfortunately one that Gawker has crossed many times in the past. How have they not been sued out of existence...

Re: Which Companies Wasted the Most Money on Super Bowl Commercials?

#26

Coke's #makeithappy campaign ended up being pulled thanks to an effort by Gawker, that's gotta have some marketing folks upset. Here's wondering if the gossip mongers like Nick Denton might have to pay the price for their tomfoolery. http://www.jta.org/2015/02/07/news-opinion/the-telegraph/whe...

I thought Coke's commercial was a great response to last year, when there was such a backlash against including a gay couple in their advertising. It's one thing for 4chan to come in and ruin the day, but for an actual company with actual managers and employees to ruin another company's advertising campaign by quoting Hitler? That's crossing a line, unfortunately one that Gawker has crossed many times in the past. Ho…

The commercial last year was the one with 'America The Beautiful' and the backlash was having it sung in other languages besides English.

Not really sure where you're pulling the gay thing from.

Re: Which Companies Wasted the Most Money on Super Bowl Commercials?

#28
post #3
post #2

Seems odd to use Youtube views to determine whether the Super Bowl spending was worthwhile. You have to choose to watch a YouTube video, while the Super Bowl ads are pushed to everyone.

The idea here is that if people connected with the video while watching the superbowl, they shared it online. Commercials were uploaded to YouTube by their respective company, and included a hashtag- deliberate pushes to form a conversation online. There are a lot of ways to measure engagement/impact of a commercial, this is one of them.

The pac-man ad is a counterpoint. It's an ad with suspense and a twist. During the Superbowl, you have to watch the whole thing. I saw it on youtube, the suspense was curious, then there was the reveal - okay, got it now, no need to watch the rest of the light show. On Youtube, you can't recapture interest, but if someone has to watch the whole thing, they can re-engage later in the ad.

This doesn't mean that the youtube analysis isn't useful, but it does highlight a difference in the mediums.

Re: Which Companies Wasted the Most Money on Super Bowl Commercials?

#29

Very nice analysis of the effectiveness of advertising. Things like this are really needed in the field.

Except I take issue with this statement from the article, especially as it applies to Superbowl Ads: A successful video will have more views, higher engagement, and resulting lower cost per minute.

The only thing that matters when putting forth a Superbowl commercial is that the viewer stood around long enough to figure out who sponsored it, even if they didn't stay for the whole thing. On air this is complicated by several factors.

The Youtube attention statistics are a nice proxy for it but it didn't take into consideration the likelihood that a potential viewer lost interest before they knew what it was 'about' (a particularly poor example of this would have been the Nationwide commercial-- people tuned out before the reveal and if they did find out who sponsored it after-the-fact, they heard it in a negative context).

And of course none of this translates directly into brand awareness, but having a talked-about Superbowl commercial is usually the point; the question is did you achieve the buzz you were looking for.

I feel a better measure of the utility of the commercial (answer the question: "what was my bang for buck vs. competitors?") would be to measure the trending of hashtags / mentions / youtube views of the commercial in the days following

Re: Which Companies Wasted the Most Money on Super Bowl Commercials?

#30

Has very little bearing and a lot of sample bias. How many of you actually viewed the commercials via Youtube? The is a connection, and the data is applicable, but only casually.

The real gold here is how Embedly tracks content engagement all the way through the video, and how that information can correlate to content success. Regardless of how casual the connection may be.

Disclosure - I run a competitor to Embedly

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