Social Media
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: Mom Power Drives Marketing Results
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Written By Ruth Nightengale | December 7, 2009 | Share This
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The fact that women are powerful is hardly news, but recent studies suggest that moms may very well represent the National Power Grid for the United States.
In a white paper published by Advertising Age, The Rise of the Real Mom, the Boston Consulting Group states that moms control $4.3 trillion of the $5.9 trillion U.S. consumer spending total, or 73% of household spend. The Shriver Report, issued in October, found that women are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families. And just last week, Google released another study on moms they are calling Four Truths about Moms and Search, created in collaboration with BabyCenter and two different research vendors between October 16 and November 17 of this year.
Search and Social Media: Your Guide to Bing and Google on The Road to Social Media
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 29, 2009 | Share This
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This week’s article by yours truly in the Huffington Post asks if Google is turning it’s back on its core values by limiting social search to folks with both Google profiles and social media profiles. Earlier in the week, my colleague Mark Pilatowski wondered whether the engines would be able to deal with the spam factor inherent in real-time search.
Before diving into the implications of real time and social search integration to the biggest search engines (excluding YouTube), it’s important to know the basics and the background to what these new deals mean to marketers and the brands who love them. Presented below is everything marketers need to know about the Bing and Google social search deals.
Search and Social: Will the Twitter Firehose Become a Sewage-Filled Spam Hose?
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Written By Mark Pilatowski | October 22, 2009 | Share This
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As most of you probably know Bing and Google announced that they have finalized agreements with Twitter to begin incorporating Tweets into their search engine results. Everyone seems to be overjoyed and excited about this. Search engines are excited because they get access to the Twitter firehose and they can begin providing real time results in the SERPs. Twitter is happy because they are finally getting paid. Searchers are happy because they can now get real time results for queries that deserve it, like breaking news. Everyone seems to be overjoyed about the possibilities and I myself am very interested to see how this all plays out. I do have one concern and that is how are Bing and Google going to deal with the issue of spam when it comes to real time search via Twitter results?
Social Media: Bad Customer Service Has an Echo Chamber Online
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 16, 2009 | Share This
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I did something a few days ago I rarely if ever do. I lost it. I got really mad and went to a terrible terrible place. That place was the one where you end up holding your iPhone up to a customer service representative and saying “I work in social media! Do you know how bad this service is for your company’s reputation!”
Oh yes, and I had the negative tweets there to prove it.
I won’t go into the details of my horror story on Delta Airlines which prompted this outburst, but you can read more about it here on the Huffington Post.
Social Media: Mix Taping Your World
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 9, 2009 | Share This
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There are a lot of theories about where social media first started. Was it in the baths of ancient Greece? Or was it deep in the bowels of the Pentagon? I have my own idea about this:
Mix tapes. Yes, mix tapes.
As I wrote in the Huffington Post the culture of customizing your own melange of information and sharing it is one of the great things about social media.Even more so, a great mix tape would get copied and re-copied spreading just like a viral video does now on YouTube.
Something to think about for the weekend!
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Social Media: FTC Blogger Rules Foster Double Standard
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 6, 2009 | Share This
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I’m a freak for car magazines. I read the British monthly Car (at 10 bucks a pop no less), Automobile, even Motor Trend - a title that never fails to raise a giggle from my wife for it’s retro specificity. They all feature monthly road tests of cars, all of which are provided for testing gratis by the manufacturers.
In fact, Car used to have a wonderful columnist named George Bishop (who is sadly now in the great beyond) who would fill his column with the intimate behind the scenes details of the lavish car launch junkets manufacturers would throw for journalists - often involving trips to exotic locales, free lodging and meals, and copious behind the wheel boozing. All the other journalists were taking part in the fun too, it’s just that Bishop saw fit to weave the freebies into his articles.
While these events have been toned-down considerably for the auto industry some version of these launch junkets still exist in other industries and free samples or products are a matter of course for any company seeking to see their product in print.
It’s interesting then that the FTC has decided to clamp down on bloggers who review products for money in a way that seems to be more onerous than the standard that journalists are held to.
Make no mistake, the meat of the ruling codifies the best practices I tell our clients about every day: transparency and authenticity. Paying bloggers for coverage should always merit disclosure.
Search News: Ask Thinks Pink in Non-Profit Partnership
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Written By Ruth Nightengale | September 14, 2009 | Share This
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Despite the innumerable times the work we do is described as “not curing cancer,” there is now a search engine trying to do just that. Or at least help the cause along. Starting today, Ask.com allows you to personalize your Ask homepage in an effort to educate other users about the fight against breast cancer. While the focus of this partnership between Ask and the non-profit Susan G. Koman for the Cure is attention and education, Ask will also be donating up to 50 cents for each user who selects the Search for the Cure page skin and answers the questions on their branded ad panel at the top of their search page:
The branded panel is interesting in that it incorporates a one-click button to donate, as well as the standard array of social media buttons to let people on sites like Facebook know about your interest in finding a cure for breast cancer. Aside from being for a good cause, this is an innovative way for a search engine to partner with a non-profit in a “takeover” of their homepage, and I expect to see more of this in the future.
Social Media: Is Facebook a Final Destination or Just Another Social Fling?
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 25, 2009 | Share This
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Recently, a client asked me why they should put time and resources into their Facebook fan page when users are only going to migrate to the next platform eventually. The question felt very last year but I had to really stop and examine why that is – what is to stop fickle users from fleeing Facebook? After all Friendster and to a lesser extent MySpace were once the networking sites du jour but each found users siphoned off by the next big thing. Why shouldn’t Facebook be a victim of user burnout too? Or does it even matter?
After all, you go where the people are today. It’s unlikely that users discovering a new social media destination will stampede in such numbers that your fan page will be rendered useless in a matter of months. Also, although they have been eclipsed by Facebook, both Friendster and especially MySpace serve particular subsets of users very well. In the case of MySpace teens and music fans find the eye-wateringly be-spangled site to be more relevant to them in many cases than Facebook.
Social Media: Is Facebook Tilting at Twitmills?
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 12, 2009 | Share This
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Facebook has moved forward on several fronts this week, from tweaking its search capabilities to include out-of-network user updates for a more “real-time” experience, to the purchase of FriendFeed and most recently the beta testing of a so-called stripped-down Facebook Lite. While there are separate logical reasons for each of these changes, many commentators have remarked that in total they suggest a renewed focus on Twitter.
But is Twitter really a competitor to Facebook? I say no.