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Super Buzz?

What's the social ROI of the most expensive ad spot of the year?

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Photo of Mike Baker

February 1, 2017

by Mike Baker
@marketingbaker

Regardless of what happens on the field on Sunday, one thing is certain: the answer to the question of “who won?” is less likely to be “Atlanta” or “New England” and more likely to be the brand or brands that most capture the water-cooler conversation the next day.

But while determining the winner of the actual game is straightforward, picking the advertiser victor is a much more subjective affair. Was “Puppy Monkey Baby” last year’s smash hit or a disturbing flop? How did Helen Mirren’s serious turn compare to the more traditional lighter fare?

Evaluating the success of a television spot — especially such an expensive one — is incredibly difficult.

At Crimson Hexagon, we like to cut through the subjectivity and use social media analytics to quantify the seemingly unquantifiable. We wanted to better understand the true ROI of an ad during the Big Game, so we decided to come up with a data-backed analysis to help you see what the advertising brands really got back from their massive investments.

How did we do it? We analyzed how much money the advertisers spent during the Big Game in 2016 and then measured that against the social conversation those ads generated.

In other words: How much social media conversation did brands get for $1 million of advertising spending.

Here are how last year’s advertisers fared:


pasted-image-at-2017_01_30-03_14-pm

As you can see, Doritos and T-Mobile received the most social buzz for every dollar spent. FitBit and WeatherTech, on the other hand, couldn’t quite split the uprights: they had the lowest social ROI for their advertising dollars.

In fact, when we use our social media ROI guide, we see that Doritos’ advertising performed 7x better than average, while WeatherTech came in 0.02x worse on average.

What separated the best from the worst? Comedy. Doritos’ “Ultrasound” ad appeared to strike a chord with viewers. Likewise, T-Mobile’s star-studded 30-second spots — one featuring Drake and another featuring Steve Harvey — both did well with social audiences.

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What will we see on Sunday? Your guess is as good as ours, but one thing is certain: the ads that most resonate with social media audiences will help you stretch advertising budget. Based on our analysis, brands that advertise during the Big Game should aim to generate at least 500 social posts for every million dollars they spend on advertising. Those that do will ensure that their ads aren’t just getting air time (for a very pretty penny) but are actually engaging consumers and generating buzz.

For more on the importance of analyzing your advertising campaigns, download our agency campaign lifecycle report here.

Photo of Mike Baker
Mike Baker
Mike is the senior manager of global content at Crimson Hexagon. He has written about big data and analytics for the past four years. Before that he has been a reporter, editor, farmer and pre-school teacher.
Follow @marketingbaker

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Crimson Hexagon

What is “The Crimson Hexagon”?

Our company’s name derives from the “Crimson Hexagon” described in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Library of Babel, which was published in Spanish in 1941 in his collection, The Garden of Forking Paths.

The narrator in Borges’s story describes a library of astronomical size comprised of almost infinite adjacent hexagonal-shaped rooms that collectively contain every possible combination of just 25 characters, a period, and a comma.

Though most of the books are gibberish, the library also contains every valuable book every written and that might ever be written.

Similarly, our Crimson Hexagon software platform finds meaning in a seemingly endless volume of unstructured text and images.

Given our name, it flows naturally that the color crimson is central to our identity.

Interestingly, our founder, Gary King, is a world-renowned social scientist and professor at Harvard University, which is another world-leading institution that also is known not only for the color crimson, but also for helping inquiring minds find meaning.

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