What a game! It’s always exciting to see the game, but even more exciting to filter through all of the post game viewing details.
Who watched it on TV?
This years game was well viewed, but came in second place (in history) in comparison to last years game. Last year’s airing was seen by 9.2 million Canadians, this year was viewed by 8.3 million Canadians, with 7.3 million viewers on CTV and 1 million on RDS. Nearly ¾ of all households tuned into the tv during the game, were tuned into the game. Tuning throughout the game was relatively consistent, though it peaked in the last 15 minutes, and really started to grow starting at the half time show.
How did it play out digitally?
On the digital front, we’re extremely interested in seeing the growth in online viewers as well as “dual screeners” and of course all of the social chatter around the game. It looks like some advertisers really capitalized on their digital placements around the game. While these examples are somewhat US focused, we certainly can see similar trends north of the border. Turbo Tax focused their efforts on YouTube, where the focused heavily on serving pre-roll and banner ads to YouTube users searching for Super Bowl content. Mercedes-Benz opted out of television ads during the big game this year, but owned the leaderboard spot on the NFL’s website from kickoff until the final whistle, while Subway had a roadblock on the CBSSports.com website. The Pandora marketing team was thinking ahead with just one week until Valentine’s day. They had many prominent placements on NBCSports.com for anyone who just happened to be in the market for some jewelry.
Super social?
We were surprised to hear that Facebook and Twitter reported a 25% drop in Super Bowl social activity in this article. 2015 saw 36 million Super Bowl related tweets with 2016 coming in closer to 27 million. Facebook saw 200 million interactions this year which is down from the 265 million Super Bowl related interactions in 2015.
The commercials certainly seemed to be more focused on humor than in passed years, with a heavy reliance on big name celebrities. Top spots came from Hyundai, Snickers, Colgate, and it’s safe to say that we’ll be hearing more about the lack of love for Mountain Dew’s #puppetmonkeybaby. That hashtag may be the winner with 65,000 mentions during the televised airing.
As self professed media geeks, we’re interested in hearing about how the conversations between Bell and the CRTC go with regards to airing the US commercials in the Canadian Super Bowl broadcast next year. This will certainly be a game changer for any advertiser wanting a piece of that pie and will likely result in pricing sky rocketing.
Checkout Hyundai’s launch of the 2017 Elantra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbGh9s4KSjk
Or Snickers commercial featuring Willem Dafoe as Marilyn Munroe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UyVgaFE8-s
Or the infamous Puppymonkeybaby spot from Mountain Dew:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql7uY36-LwA