It's not just the NFL Super Bowl, it's the advertising Super Bowl as well. It's that time of the year when some of the biggest and most popular brands roll out their best creative and compete for the best ad of the game. It's a time when millions of viewers around North America are glued to their TV sets watching every play and every commercial. And it's the one time of the year where fast-forwarding through commercials would be a crime and DVRing the big game would be blasphemy.
Similar to years gone by, this year we're sure to come across ads from the likes of Coca-Cola, GoDaddy and if we're lucky, Google. On top of that, the one industry that continues to fund and go all in on Super Bowl commercials is the automotive industry. Year over year, we've come across some great campaigns such as this brilliant ad from VW: That advertisement alone has gone on to be viewed more than 50 million times. But that's largely in part due to the creative concept and the fact that it's from 2011. The question that marketers, brands and the entire automotive industry have been pondering is whether or not the Super Bowl can drive real results for their brand. For some reason, automotive brands continue to flock towards the Super Bowl and spend millions each year to have their ads run. Here's the auto brands on deck for 2014:
- Chevrolet - Back for more after expressing the cost to be a deterrent in 2013.
- Hyundai - 7th consecutive Super Bowl spot - Running two ads in 2014.
- Jaguar - New to the Super Bowl - locked in for a 60 second spot.
- Kia - 5th consecutive Super Bowl spot - This one is Matrix-inspired.
- Toyota - One 60 second spot that features Muppets.
- Volkswagen - One 60 second spot in the second quarter.
That's six automotive companies and 7 automotive ads. It's clear that automotive companies recognize something special about the Super Bowl so we thought we should dig deeper to find out what it was. Our first step was to put ourselves in the advertisers shoes and ask the right questions. Who will see it? How many? Who are they? To answer these questions, we turned to our software to offer up an analysis on whether or not these ads were reaching the right people.
LeadSift is a tool that is meant to identify and deliver relevant social leads directly to business and brands. It scans social conversations and cuts through the noise to deliver only the conversations that are relevant. Using LeadSift, we were able to scan 100 million tweets over the course of January to identify the number of people who will be tuned into the Super Bowl this Sunday. From there, we took these individuals and analyzed their tweets to identify which of these people were in the market for buying a new or used car. The results would determine how many people in the market for buying a car are actually watching the Super Bowl.
According to their research, in the month of January, there were 229,985 in the market for buying a car. Of that, we determined that 24.19% of these people would be tuned into the Super Bowl this Sunday. Giving a clear indication as to why these automotive companies cough up millions of dollars each year to have their creative placed in front of this audience. When an audience is in the market for your product, it's time to build awareness and share your story.
And the Super Bowl gives brands an opportunity to do just that.