Other than the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who won the Super Bowl? Everybody’s got an opinion. For starters, check out Ad Age’s “Super Bowl 2021 ad review” (spots from Indeed and Tide were among those that earned our highest five-star rating) and USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter (which gave its highest marks to a couple of Rocket Mortgage commercials).
Meanwhile, Ad Age has once again partnered with iSpot.tv, the always-on TV ad measurement and attribution company, to get the big picture on digital activity across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube surrounding this year’s Super Bowl ads. In other words, this is about what specifically resonated online/socially on Super Bowl Sunday. (As always, we didn’t factor TV show promos and movie ads/trailers into the mix.)
Before you dive into the chart below, a few quick notes: “Major Melon Bottle Count,” from Mtn Dew (as Mountain Dew styles its name) may be No. 1, but with a caveat. The whole point of the ad starring John Cena was to get you to tweet (your count or guess of the total number of bottles of Major Melon on view in the ad to try to win $1 million)—i.e., the spot had a built-in social activation—so naturally that inflated social impressions. At No. 2: “Alexa’s Body,” for Amazon’s Echo device, which leveraged Michael B. Jordan’s star power, and has the most earned views (more than 8 million) online. And a lesson from the No. 3 ad, Jeep’s ‘The Middle”: Lots of social chatter doesn’t, of course, necessarily mean people loved the creative; the prevailing assessment of this ad was that it was “preachy,” iSpot tells us.