How Super Bowl commercials scored on digital and social media: Tuesday Wake-Up Call

Welcome to Ad Age’s Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital news. If you're reading this online or in a forwarded email, here's the link to sign up for our Wake-Up Call newsletters. Ad touchdowns and fumbles Good morning! Even if Super Bowl fatigue is setting in, don’t click out of this newsletter too quickly, because the second-best part of Super Bowl ads—after watching them, of course—is seeing how viewers responded. We partnered with measurement and attribution company iSpot.tv to see which spots had the greatest digital share of voice across TV, earned online views and social impressions on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. According to iSpot.tv data, 56 advertisers and their 67 spots airing during Super Bowl LV brought in more than 6.3 billion TV ad impressions, 26 million earned online views and 64 billion social impressions. The brands with the highest digital share of voice include Mtn Dew's spot featuring John Cena, Amazon’s Alexa spot with Michael B. Jordan and Jeep’s “The Middle” with Bruce Springsteen. And, according to analytics firm Brandwatch's analysis of reaction to ads on Twitter, Mtn Dew, the Pepsi halftime show and State Farm received the most positive mentions; Oatly, TurboTax and Robinhood saw the most negative reactions; and Jeep and Squarespace sparked disagreement in social conversations. Consumer survey responses When advertising analytics company Ace Metrix surveyed 500 Super Bowl viewers, though, the results were surprisingly different. Cheetos’ “It Wasn’t Me,” with Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher and Shaggy, won for funniest ad with a score of 8.4 out of 10; Indeed’s “The Rising” won for most empowering with a 5.1 score; and Bass Pro Shop’s “Get Back to Nature” was tops among first-time Super Bowl advertisers. Meanwhile, Rocket Mortgage’s “Certain is Better” commercials featuring Tracy Morgan ranked first and second in USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter, which is based on a live poll of Super Bowl viewers. In case you missed the Ad Age 2021 Super Bowl ad review, catch it here. Super Bowl ads, Canadian-style While Americans are conditioned to big-budget, celeb-filled Super Bowl ads that up the ante every year, audiences in Canada typically have less to look forward to. Let Ad Age’s Ethan Jakob Craft, who hails from the Great White North, explain: “Canadian Super Bowl commercials fall into three primary categories: only-in-Canada ads produced specifically for that market, often by Canadian creative agencies; big-budget American commercials licensed to air internationally; and reruns of brands’ general TV campaigns that have, in some cases, been airing for weeks before the game.” Advertisers had more time this year to determine their Big Game strategies, and global brands including Bubly, Heinz and Walmart brought exclusive ads to the Canadian market. Still, Craft writes that it “wouldn’t be a Canadian broadcast of the Super Bowl without some commercials getting cut off prematurely when players return to the field thanks to mismatched advertising blocks.” Reddit doubles in value After adding users during the pandemic and receiving attention for its part in a recent Wall Street trading frenzy by small investors, Reddit Inc. doubled its valuation to $6 billion in a new round of funding, The Wall Street Journal reports. Reddit, founded in 2005, will use the new funding to invest in areas including video, advertising and consumer products, said Chief Executive Steve Huffman, as well as expansion into international markets. “Valuations are very high right now," said Huffman, whose company received $250 million in a late-stage funding round led by venture-capital firm Vy Capital. "It never hurts to raise money when there’s an opportunity to do so and Reddit had a strong year.” Just briefly: Amplifying Black deaf voices It's Week Two of our Black History Month series in which Black industry leaders curate examples of the industry’s Black creative excellence. This week, Storm Smith, producer at BBDO in Los Angeles, joins us as guest editor. Smith, the first deaf woman recruited by BBDO Worldwide, shares a film she made to amplify the voices of the Black deaf community in response to the deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police. Ad Age Next: Health & Wellness Join us on Thursday, Feb. 11, for a virtual event that examines the business of wellness and how it continues to evolve. The virtual event will take a critical look at the new trends driving growth in the category—what is here to stay and what is a passing fad from COVID? The event will include one-on-one chats with brand executives as well as panels looking at the lasting potential of larger topics, such as tech-focused health startups geared to home environments. Lunar New Year Brands are starting to drop spots to celebrate this year’s Lunar New Year, Feb. 12. Panda Express has a new endearing film from its agency of record, The Many, that shows how the holiday can bring people together, even across cultures. “In approaching this short film, it was important for us to focus on authenticity for not only the holiday but also for our current times,” Kevin Holmes, executive director of marketing communications at Panda Express, tells Ad Age’s Ann-Christine Diaz. That does it for today’s Wake-Up Call. Thanks for reading and we hope you are all staying safe and well. For more industry news and insight, follow us on Twitter: @adage. From CMO Strategy to the Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, we’ve got newsletters galore. See them all here. Subscribers make the difference. Individual, group and corporate subscriptions are available—including access to our Ad Age Datacenter. Find options at AdAge.com/membership.

How Super Bowl commercials scored on digital and social media: Tuesday Wake-Up Call

Featured Stories