PeopleBrowsr Officiates the

2011 Twitter Brand Bowl: And

the winners are…
Super Bowl XLV is now in the history books.
2011 is the year that the Green Bay Packers
reclaimed the NFL Championship. And, it is
also the year that now holds the record for
the most viewed television broadcast of any
kind in U.S. history, attracting an audience of
over 111 million viewers.

While many watched the game, it is the

advertisements that spark conversations
online and offline. Going back to Apple’s
1984 commercial directed by Ridley Scott
that introduced the Macintosh, the Super
Bowl is now as much about football as it is
about the ads that support it.

At $3 million per 30 second commercial, many question the value and ROI of
such an elite form of advertising. To others however, $3 million is an investment
in word of mouth and legacy branding. It takes the idea of the desirable water
cooler effect and amplifies it in real-time across more connected networks. Not
only did 111 million people potentially view the ads during the big game, Web
views, articles, blog posts, polls and studies keep each ad alive for the months
ahead. Crowd favorites on the other hand, live on for years. Those commercials
that design social hooks into the campaign can trigger conversations that extend
ads across screens from TV to laptop to mobile as well as across social graphs.
Progressive brands that track this activity will identify its core advocates and
better understand how to convert social graphs into brand graphs as we
demonstrated with Starbucks recently.

Following the Super Bowl, the big question at the center of almost every
conversation is who really won the 2011 Brand Bowl. The answer is largely
based on opinion and volume, but examining the activity under a social
microscope is as telling as it is fascinating.

Working with the PeopleBrowsr Research.ly team, we tapped the Twitter firehose
to analyze the worldwide conversations around each commercial. As you’ll see,
in the Brand Bowl, armchair quarterbacks and sofa referees define the big game
for advertisers; an expensive game where some win and many lose.
Report Highlights:

 Brand Bowl Tweets increased 271-percent between 2010 and 2011

 Doritos received the highest number of mentions in 2010 and the third
highest in 2011.
 The auto industry also represented the most social activity of all
commercials in 2011 led by Chrysler, VW, and Chevrolet.
 Ads placed in the second quarter captured the most online viewing
attention than other spots.
 VW’s “The Force” commercial earned the most positive sentiment.
 Groupon ads received the most negative response.

2011 Brand Bowl Highlight Reel

Between 2010 and 2011, Tweets about the advertisers in the big game spiked by
271-percent. Of course Twitter also experienced tremendous growth between the
games, now accounting for ~200 million users who publish 110 million Tweets
per day.

This year, the top commercial dominated the field earning 64-percent more
Tweets than its closest competitor. The honor for the most mentioned brand in
this year’s Brand Bowl goes to Doritos with 77.8k mentions. The Transformers 3
trailer followed with an impressive 49.6k Tweets, and drafting close behind was
Chrysler with 49k Tweets.

The 2011 Top 11 Commercials by Volume:

1. Doritos – 77,799 mentions

2. Transformers 3 – 49,559
3. Chrysler – 49,079
4. Coca-Cola/Coke – 33,082
5. Volkswagen/VW – 30,050
6. Groupon – 30,011
7. Chevrolet/Chevy – 25,743
8. Captain America – 25,315
9. Sketchers – 23,859
10. Thor – 23,096
11. Pepsi Max – 18,849
If we were to measure the top ads by velocity, the Transformers 3 preview would
lead the game spiking at 40,000 mentions. Chrysler’s inspirational “Imported from
Detroit” spot featuring rapper Eminem ranked a close second hitting a crescendo
at just under 39,000 mentions. Doritos crunched in the third spot at over 34,000
Tweets. The distance between third and fourth place is as great as the span
between the second and third quarter in the big game. Sketchers ShapeUps
commercial featured Kim Kardashian, which helped it peak at just over 21,000
Tweets.

The 2011 Top 10 Commercials by Velocity:

1. Transformers 3
2. Chrysler
3. Doritos
4. Sketchers
5. Thor
6. Captain America
7. Volkswagen/VW
8. Coca-Cola/Coke
9. Groupon
10. Chevrolet/Chevy
11. Pepsi Max
2010 Brand Bowl Highlights

Compared to the top 2010 ads by volume, you’ll notice that Doritos remains in
the top 3 between the two years, winning the Bowl in 2010, at least where
mentions are concerned. Of all the ads between 2010 and 2011 only Doritos and
Coca-Cola/Coke make the top 10 lists consecutively.

The Top 10 Brands by Volume:

1. Doritos – 41,748
2. Bud Light – 15,555
3. Google AD – 12,120
4. CocaCola – 9,299
5. Budweiser – 8,067
6. Snickers – 6,945
7. GoDaddy – 5,993
8. Kia – 3,873
9. Hyundai – 2,793
10. Focus on the Family – 2,024

The 2010 Top 10 ads by Velocity:

1. Doritos
2. Bud Light
3. Budweiser
4. Google
5. Snickers
6. GoDaddy
7. Kia
8. Hyundai
9. Coca-Cola
10. Focus (on the family)
<img src= https://img.skitch.com/20110214-cjy1a11q4tk8gf4tesq7fndesd.jpg>

Brand Bowl 2011 vs. 2010

As mentioned earlier, the volume between the years is remarkable. The active
audience is this year’s Brand Bowl was indeed engaged, representing a surge in
Tweets to 387,162 total ad mentions in 2011 and 99,124 in 2010.

To put things in perspective however, if we assumed that each of the 111 million
estimated viewers Tweeted once, it would represent a .035 participation level. As
such, we analyzed the top 11 brands and of those mentioned, 90-percent of the
Tweets were published by 44-percent of the engaged community.
The top four players in 2011 outplayed the top performers in 2010. Doritos’ 2011
appearance ranked third in overall volume of Tweets between the two years with
its 2010 showing also ranking fifth. Doritos is the only 2010 representative
appearing in the Top 10 comparison between the two years, with Bud Light
finishing 11th.
<img src=https://img.skitch.com/20110214-f3iw4ebdfc64i18nbfidctrxyk.jpg>

2011 vs. 2010 Player Stats

Comparing the 2010 to 2011 year to date changes, most players experienced
positive growth. Ranking based on YTD % changes, Coca-Cola is the clear
winner, with conversations increasing by over 263.5-percent. Doritos led the pack
in overall conversations with just under 80,000 mentions in 2011 and just over
half that in 2010, growing by 88.3-percent. Kia Tweets jumped by 200-percent,
reaching over 10,000 Tweets in 2011. Snickers followed in fourth growing by 79-
percent. Bud Light saw a 24-percent drop in Tweets falling from 15,000 Tweets
to just over 12,000.
2011 Player Sentiment

Sentiment is an elusive metric. To quantify attitudes accurately, it takes a human

touch. To do so, we employed a human turked sentiment sample of 2,000
random Tweets for the Top 11 brands.
Of the top brands in 2011, Volkswagen/VW’s “The Force” campaign earned the
most love reaching almost 90-percent positive reactions. Transformers 3 earned
a second place standing with 77-percent positive sentiment. Movies will account
for three of the top five with Captain America closely following Transformers with
74-percent positive Tweets. And, right behind Captain America is another hero,
Thor hammers fourth 72-percent positive reactions. Not surprisingly, Chrysler
drives into fifth place with 71-percent.
Not all Tweets are positive however. Several commercials this year earned
greater negative reactions than some of the top brands earned in terms of
positive sentiment. The leader here, which may come as no surprise, is Groupon
with a 75-percent negative response. The ads were controversial in nature, but
according to the Tweets and all intentions aside, they were also in poor taste.
These ads have since been pulled from television circulation. At 47-percent, it
seems that the Sketchers spots featuring Kim Kardashian stuck a sour note with
viewers. Coca-Cola and Pepsi Max, while mostly positive or neutral, also realized
a notable negative response.
Overall however, viewers responded positively to the 2011 Brand Bowl. An
interesting observation however, 2011 negative sentiment is almost equal to the
positive sentiment shared in 2010.

That about wraps our post-game analysis. We’ll see you in 2012 for the next
Brand Bowl, where you define the winners and the losers just by Tweeting your
honest reactions.

Brian Solis is the Chief Data Analyst at ReSearch.ly and author of Engage, the
complete guide for businesses to build and measure success in the social web.
Follow him on Twitter, @briansolis or read his blog, BrianSolis.com