The Super Bowl might be the world’s greatest match of football titans with one of the world’s largest audiences topping out at around 111 Million tuning in for the game. But only slightly half of the audience are there to watch the actual football game according to some new research from Lightspeed research who surveyed over 2000 Americans online and found that nearly as many viewers were interested in the football as they were for the advertising.
The kingpin who started the advertising revolution on the Super Bowl was none other than Apple — with their “1984″ ad which launched the Macintosh computer they reportedly got $150 million dollars in media value from that one Super Bowl spot because of the commentary on ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC and others. So this year we set out on a quest to declare a winner of the Super Bowl from a different perspective. A brand that got the most media value (what we are terming as Social Lift) from their advertising on the Super Bowl.
We are defining Social Lift as the increase in buzz from a baseline we took before the Super Bowl (Jan 1 to Feb 4) compared to Super Bowl and directly after the Super Bowl from Feb 6 and 7. And the other dimension we measured was the efficiency of spend which is the total media value divided by the estimated spend on the ads. The numbers were averaged to create an index. So a “2″ is twice as efficient in creating social lift per dollar spent as the average ad in Super Bowl 2011.
