Feb 4, 2013
With the Super Bowl bringing in such a large, captive audience, its no surprise that advertisers were willing to shell out millions of dollars in hopes of attracting new customers, or retaining current customers.
New York based RFI Studios launched a real-time web app designed to track advertisers success through the Super Bowl through Facebook. The app, which launched on LikeBlitz.com, followed the advertising brands of each company advertising during the Super Bowl, displaying the number of “likes” received during the game,
“We were just curious about the social pay-off of a $3.8 million television commercial,” said Scott Schneider , Chief Digital Officer. “We think a Facebook Like has a ‘gateway effect’ on a person’s social engagement with a brand, so we made something simple that you could look at in real-time during the game.” (via Press Release)
The results of this social media . Perhaps the most interesting is that brands like MiO and Samsung both lost Likes during the Super Bowl, while Oreo, who had some clever “blackout” tweets to accompany their Super Bowl commercial gained roughly 2000 Likes. Winning the day was the Iron Man 3 page, pulling in nearly 30,000 new Likes, with a teaser trailer of the movie being shown during the big game.
It was also surprising to see that a brand like Mercedes Benz, which was intrinsically tied to the power outage, actually still saw an increase in Likes throughout the course of the game, while other brands like Kia and E*Trade saw little movement one way or the other.
Of course, the little caveat that potentially throws a wrench into the entire system is the fact that each of these brands have the ability to advertise directly on Facebook and target a particular group. With companies essentially being able to buy clicks for somewhere in between $.30 and $2.00 depending on the brand and target audience, even Iron Man’s 30,000 Likes for $4 million dollars makes little sense when you could advertise on Facebook and generate that many Likes for a fraction of the cost. Of course, Facebook is just one of many target audiences for brands looking to promote their products, and the Likes referenced on the Like Blitz app are all without focusing on Facebook or even promoting a Facebook page, so targeted Facebook marketing, they are not.
One comment
The return on investment metrics into social media advertising are of course still evolving. A post, like, tweet, etc. surely create great awareness…but are all these campaigns translating into any purchases yet? The old-school medium of television…Super Bowl ads often have generated brand buzz…but big bucks?