Search Marketing Scorecard
Top 5 Cross-Channel Lessons Learned from the Super Bowl
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 11, 2010 | Share This
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On Monday morning, we released our 6th Annual Search Marketing Scorecard on the Super Bowl.
Unlike the USAToday AdMeter, YouTube’s AdBlitz or most other Super Bowl ad rankings, we focus on just about everything relating to a marketer’s campaign OTHER than the quality of their creative.
Instead, our Scorecard ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on their visibility in search and social media immediately after their TV spots aired. Essentially, we’re evaluating the steps each brand took to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl advertising investment.
So what were some of the biggest takeaways from the big game?
No Rookie Mistakes Here: Among the top-rated brands in our scorecard were three first-time Super Bowl advertisers – Boost Mobile, HomeAway and Google. All three brands turned compelling TV ads into meaningful online experiences. The brands were highly visible across the major search engines, and met interested consumers’ interest with content that easily extended the value of their TV commercials.
Advertising – Now With More Tailgating!: As any football fan will tell you, one of the best parts of going to a game isn’t the game itself, but the party leading up to it. So why should it be any different for the advertisers? 37% of the advertisers in this year’s game launched initiatives weeks and, in some cases, even months before the Super Bowl, building buzz and anticipation for their spots.
This is a significant shift in the way brands view the big game, one that’s taken place over the last few years. Super Bowl Sunday used to be about the big reveal – new spots were guarded more carefully than the president’s nuclear football. But in the age of social media, brands are finding benefits in opening the kimono a little early, not only showing consumers what they’re in for, but actually giving them the playbook and letting them lead the drive. The best example? Doritos’ incredibly successful Crash the Super Bowl promotion, which let consumers develop (and promote) their own spots, with the top three getting Super Bowl airtime. This not only cut down on Doritos’ production budget, but gave them an army of marketers all jockeying to earn :30 of worldwide fame.
Where’s the Brand Investment?: For the first time in five years, we saw a significant decrease in the number of companies visible in paid search for their brand names. (63% down from a high of 70%). While marketers have often struggled with the question of whether or not to buy their brand on search engines, it should be a no-brainer on Super Sunday. Only paid search offers the ability to control the message shows to consumers, allowing better integration with a short-term promotion like, say, the Super Bowl. This was most certainly a trend we expected to see heading in the other direction.
Social Took a Back Seat: Many pundits (including the one on the other end of this keyboard) expected this year’s Super Bowl to act as a coming out party of sorts in the way that mainstream marketers used social media during the game. We expected brands to end every commercial with breathless pleas to “Fan us on Facebook!” or “Follow us on Twitter!” We expected those channels to be literally buzzing at game time, with special offers for consumers, and for brands to loosen their controls and engage in real conversations with their customers.
And what did we get?
Well, to be fair, there were a few marketers thinking outside the box – For instance, Google drove viewers directly to YouTube, and E*Trade included Facebook & YouTube widgets on the end card of their commercial. Unfortunately, for most of the field, it was more of the same. 91% of the 57 brands we tracked had a presence on at least one of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, but the conversation on those channels was fairly typical and one-sided: “Hey everybody, watch our ads! We’re proud of them!” Still plenty room for improvement.
No Commercial? No Problem! – There are only so many brands with $2.5 million sitting around to spend on a Super Bowl spot, but the buzz and interest generated by those spots isn’t only the domain of Big Game advertisers. Take tax prep-software TurboTax – given the timing of the Super Bowl, they knew that the Super Bowl would drive millions of people to the search box looking for information relating to the game, players, halftime performers and advertisers.
As a result, the company was extremely aggressive in paid search, with a campaign reminding consumers of the benefits of their package. While they didn’t explicitly say the words Super Bowl or even football, the landing page had football personality Chris Berman and a “tax coach of the year” trophy that looks awfully familiar.
In all, a savvy move to build awareness for their service in an unobtrusive (albeit not entirely relevant) way.
Want even more information about how brands fared in this year’s cross-channel marketing showdown? Register today to reserve your place at Reprise Media’s annual Super Bowl webinar, which will be held next Friday, February 19th at 2PM EST.
Among the topics we’ll cover:
• An in-depth look at the winners and losers in search and social media buzz
• Innovative tactics for tapping into the post-bowl surge in interest
• Potential pitfalls that could keep your brand on the bench
Which Brands Scored an Integrated Touchdown at Super Bowl 44?
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 8, 2010 | Share This
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This morning, Reprise Media released our 6th annual Search Marketing Scorecard on the Super Bowl, which ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence in search and social media –measuring how prepared each brand was to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl advertising investment. The Search Marketing Scorecard is the longest-running study of its kind.
The audience for this year’s Super Bowl was primed and ready for integrated campaigns. According to a recent comScore study, 1/3 of the 90 million people planning to watch the Super Bowl expected to log on to their computers during the game. Furthermore, One out of every ten viewers (or nearly 9 million people) were going to use their computers specifically to seek out advertiser websites. That sounds like an audience that’s not only interested in the ads, but interested in having real interactions with brands, which is what our study is all about.
So how did this year’s advertisers do?
This year’s scorecard (which can be viewed by clicking the thumbnail to the left) saw the crowning of three rookie advertisers, as Boost Mobile, HomeAway and Google scored integrated marketing touchdowns in their first Super Bowl outing. The spots were joined in the win column by multiple-time champion E*Trade.
EDITOR’S NOTE: While it didn’t factor into the scoring in any way, it also didn’t hurt that Boost Mobile (with their Tim & Eric directed remix of the Super Bowl Shuffle) and Home Away (with the triumphant return of the Griswolds!) had two of my favorite ads of the night.
Furthermore, Denny’s, which rated a Fumble last year during their Free Grand Slam Breakfast promotion, turned in a solid performance, which bumped them up a few levels to a First and Gold advertiser - room for improvement, but a marked improvement over last year when their website crashed due to a lack of server capacity on the night of the game. (Rule #1 of cross-channel integration… make sure you can handle it if your stuff goes TRULY viral). This year, the restaurateur’s screaming chicken-related landing pages loaded quickly, pointing users to more info about the hugely successful promotion.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, PopSecret/Diamond Nuts was hard to find on the night of the Super Bowl - surprising given their pre-game promotion about using search and social to connect their campaigns. They were joined in the Fumble category by Dockers, Dodge Charger and Intel.
We also saw the return of a strategy we like to refer to as ad drafting, where companies not participating in the Super Bowl pull a judo move, buying keywords relating to their competitors and using their own energy against them. The most egregious of these drafters? Turbo Tax, who seemed to be buying every single keyword related to the Super Bowl that we could think of. They were visible for most brand names, generic super bowl keywords and more. Honorable mention goes to Pepsi (who were buying Coke related terms), and both Monster & Careerbuilder, who once again bought each others’ brand names and taglines in an effort to poach resumes and job hunters from the super bowl market.
Want to know more about the best in integrated marketing campaigns from the Super Bowl? Stay tuned to this blog over the next few days, as we dig into more of the data around our analysis to provide some useful trends and best practices. We’ll also be sharing some data from our partners at Trendrr, who provided conversation monitoring for all Super Bowl adds over the past few weeks.
And don’t forget to sign up for our upcoming Super Bowl webinar, which will be held on Feb 19th at 2pm. We’ll review all the winners and losers from this year’s Big Game, and provide analysis on what actually happened with all that buzz once users went online.
What did you think? Did you see any campaigns that you thought did a particularly good job integrating their messages cross channel?
Search and Social Media Webinars: Integrated Marketing and the Super Bowl
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Written By Noah Mallin | February 10, 2009 | Share This
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Mark your calendars: Tomorrow, Wednesday February 11th Reprise Media will be conducting our webinar Going for the Extra Point: Integrated Marketing Lessons To Be Learned From The Super Bowl. It starts at 2PM ET.
The Super Bowl is the biggest Television advertising event of the year – the perfect lab to explore the integration of offline with online campaigns. Reprise Media has been studying this for 5 years so we have the expertise to lay out best practices, things to avoid, and the best ways to capitalize on television campaigns in search and social media.
Among the topics we will cover:
• How marketing buzz translates into online activity
• The website traffic impact of integrating your marketing campaigns
• Examples of the best examples of integrated marketing from the Big Game
• Tips for immediately increasing the overall impact of your marketing efforts
Register today for the webinar, it’s free. As Bill Cosby used to say - if you’re not careful, you might just learn something.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Search News: Super Bowl Scorecard – Getting Drafty
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 5, 2009 | Share This
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Our continued coverage of our Fifth Annual Search Marketing Scorecard, looking at Super Bowl advertisers to see how well they integrated their TV spots with search and social media, brings us to a little something the cool kids like to call “ad drafting.” “Was ist das?”you might ask, were you German.
The concept of ad drafting comes from the ancient practice of drafting as perfected on NASCAR Ovals across the country in which a driver in a slower car uses the slipstream of faster competitors to slingshot ahead of them. Paid search advertisers can play a similar game, using key words and phrases from another’s campaign to capitalize on buzz and slingshot themselves into the top search results listings.
The Burger School of Drafting
In school I learned about why McDonald’s and Burger King tried to build their stores as close to each other as possible in a centralized population location. The thinking was that people are lazy and are likely to go to the place closest to them when given the option of two outlets selling essentially the same thing. Setting up shop next to each other was a way to maximize sales for both stores within their given radius.
Search News: Super Bowl Scorecard – Brands That Fumbled
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 4, 2009 | Share This
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We’re continuing our coverage of our Fifth Annual Search Marketing Scorecard, which looks at how well advertisers on this year’s Super Bowl broadcast integrated their search engine and social media marketing. Yesterday we pointed to Touchdowns… the brands that made into our top tier. As you might expect, those Touchdown scoring brands have their mirror opposites in our Fumble category – brands that blew their opportunity to integrate their Super Bowl TV spots with their search and social media marketing.
The Hall of Shame
Just as our study has produced some Hall of Famer’s - brands that have consistently integrated their campaigns across channels - there are some brands that seem to always let the ball slip through their fingers. Coca-Cola’s ad featuring insects conspiring to spirit away a bottle of soda was whimsical, and rated well in the USA Today AdMeter but when it came to tying it in with the brand’s presence online the results were quite poor. The tag line was “Open Happiness” but good luck finding the ad if you search for it. There is no paid search against the term and no social media pages set up for it.
Search News: Super Bowl Scorecard – Behind The Winners
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 3, 2009 | Share This
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Now that the dust has settled and Pittsburghers have had their parade, we can dig into just who the big winners are in this year’s Reprise Media Search Marketing Scorecard were and more precisely – why?
E-Trade’s Touchdown
We touched a little bit on overall Touchdown winner E-Trade yesterday but it’s worth going more in depth about what they did right. Their story is all the more notable for having come up short last year by failing to integrate their search strategy with what they were doing on television.
Search News: Super Bowl Scorecard - What’s the Lifecycle of Your Ad?
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 2, 2009 | Share This
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This year’s Reprise Media Super Bowl Scorecard is out - after all our prep and numbers crunching it’s nice to send our baby out in the world, redfaced and wailing. Oh yeah, and there was some kind of football game that kept interrupting the ads.
One thing I noticed was that for a number of the brands in our top “Touchdown” category, search and social media were used to really extend the lifetime of the ads. Our top ranked brand, E-Trade, had “outtakes” with those mischievous babies acting quite naughty. These were linked up with their paid search campaign well in advance of Super Bowl Sunday. It’s a measure of the quality of these that not once did I think “Where’s John Travolta and Kirstie Alley?” Until now.
The ad on game night drove folks back to their website and to search where even if they typed in realted phrases like “talking babies” they were served up an ad that linked back to an E-Trade landing site (and not thankfully to the Wayan’s Brothers film Little Man.)
Super Bowl Advertising: 5th Annual Search Marketing Scorecard Rates the MVP’s
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Written By Noah Mallin | January 26, 2009 | Share This
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The late, great comedian George Carlin had a routine that delineated the many differences between baseball and football as games and culture. One of his observations is that baseball is a 19th century pastoral game whereas football is a 20th century technological struggle. Much the same could be said about Super Bowl advertising – though as we burrow ever deeper into the 21st century it’s time for us to drop those 20th century advances (Claymation! Frogs! Celebrity endorsements!) and move onto the new tech.
That’s why for the last 4 years Reprise Media has been issuing our Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard. The Scorecard measures how well Super Bowl advertisers are leveraging their fancy-shmancy expensive TV ads with their online marketing efforts. Here’s last year’s Scorecard to help you get the gist.
This year the Scorecard will be released February 2nd, natch, as the game is on the 1st. Here are some of the key questions we expect to be able to answer this year:
Super Bowl 2008: Fumbling Through Social Media
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | February 7, 2008 | Share This
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With the release of Reprise Media’s 2008 Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard, this week on Searchviews we’ve recapped and reviewed the Super Bowl’s biggest winners and losers in integrating TV ads with online strategy. Today, we’ll take a closer look at one criteria of the Scorecard that’s new this year: social media.
Social media factored into the final rankings this year for a couple of reasons. First, over the last couple of years, Internet traffic has shifted dramatically from portals and shopping sites to social media sites. Second, these sites are highly visible in organic search results - sometimes ranking higher than a company’s website - making them important to branding and driving traffic.
So a few days before game day, we looked at YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook for profiles belonging to known game-day advertisers; see screenshots of our findings on the Reprise Media Flickr page. Brands got points toward their Scorecard standing for having official profiles, groups, video channels, etc. on those three sites, which are among the most popular. Also, MySpace and YouTube both created special pages to highlight Super Bowl ads.
Our findings showed that while marketers have gotten a little bit savvier about search over the four years we’ve tracked the big game (20% more bought search ads for their branded names this year than last) they’re not as smart about social media. Fewer than half of advertisers had profiles on social networks and video-sharing sites, and only 14% had Super Bowl-related content on social networks.
This year, one clever advertiser, Dunkin’ Donuts, used search to drive traffic right to its YouTube channel, which Pizza Hut did last year.
But zero advertisers, not even the winners, called out their social media profiles in their TV ads, which is a missed opportunity for many of them because of the prevalence of squatters on branded pages that can make official pages hard to find (again, see our Super Bowl social media Flickr set).
In coming years, advertisers will likely begin to wise up about the importance of social media in cross-channel marketing, much like they’re getting savvier about paid search. This year, they weren’t quite there yet.
For all the Super Bowl ad winners and losers, download the Scorecard. And stay tuned for our upcoming whitepaper, which will be released February 21.
Super Bowl 2008: The Losing Brands
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | February 6, 2008 | Share This
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This week Reprise Media released its Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard, and yesterday we highlighted last year’s winners. Today we turn our attention to the bottom three - the brands that did a poor job integrating television and search marketing, missing out on the huge influx of game-related Internet traffic.
The Super Bowl drew a record 97.5 million viewers this year - its largest audience ever and the second largest ratings number in all of TV history (the 1983 MASH finale took first place). Nearly 20% of the TV audience made it online last year; if that percentage stuck, it translates to about 19 million people this year.
But the people that didn’t capitalize on that traffic bump this year are…
- Disney
Its ad for upcoming animated feature WALL-E got Disney fans in our office really excited, but the company didn’t run any paid search ads, much less paid search targeting its Super Bowl ad. Moreover, though the movie showed up in organic results, its landing page had no Super Bowl related content, even though it appears Disney set up YouTube channels for both WALL-E and the other movie it was advertising, Prince Caspian. Disney’s presence in the bottom three is reflective of the performance of most of the entertainment companies that advertised during the Super Bowl; they treated the biggest ad day of the year like business as usual.
- Hershey’s
The Hershey’s ad for IceBreakers gum with Carmen Electra wasn’t groundbreaking in creativity, but it would really have benefited from a tighter online strategy. First, the ad was not supported by any paid search, failing to take advantage of its spokesperson’s star power or it’s “Whoa” tagline. The brand wasn’t visible in organic searches for the term “Ice Breakers,” so their landing page, which actually isn’t so bad because it does include the ad and outtakes, was very difficult to find. They should have made all the video content on their landing page embeddable, though, becaue the page that looks like it might be the official Ice Breakers YouTube channel is totally underdeveloped, featuring just the one video that aired on game day. The TV ad also failed to include a URL or call to action. Ice Breakers Ice Cubes gum was hard to find in organic search, and missing from paid search, making for missed opportunities all around.
- Zantac
Our biggest loser this year, Zantac did nearly everything wrong when it comes to integrating TV and online marketing. Like our other losers, the company did not run any paid search (and its competitors most certainly did). Though Zantac did include a URL in its ad, there was no call to action, and its landing page didn’t feature the ad. Zantac failed to upload its spot to MySpace’s Super Bowl 2008 ad channel. It also didn’t take advantage of YouTube’s Super Bowl ad channel or create its own branded channel (they do have the ad up on AOL Video, but YouTube gets the most traffic so they should have been there). Zantac definitely has a presence on YouTube, but probably not the presence they want to have there: take a look at the screenshot below, where the first two video results feature the words “junk” and “yucky,” two terms no company wants people to associate with its brand.
In sum, though 70% of advertisers bought branded keywords this year, up 20% over last year, our Scorecard losers missed the boat. Interestingly, all the brands, even our winners, lost points in one regard: though almost half of them had branded social media profiles, no advertisers called it out in their TV ad this year. We’ll write more about social media in tomorrow’s post, so stay tuned. Download the full Search Marketing Scorecard on the Reprise Media website.