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Best Super Bowl Campaign is the Esurance Twitter Sweepstakes

Many had feared and predicted on how the weather was going to be a big factor during Super Bowl 48 and it wasn’t. What we didn’t predict is that the Denver Broncos weren’t going to be a factor either!  The Seattle Seahawks dominated the entire game and won their first Super Bowl in their franchise history with a 43-8 win over the Broncos. Congrats Seahawks.

All the brands were there though with their millions of dollars worth of TV ads. Fox reported that the actual Super Bowl had attracted 112.2 million viewers. The major difference this year is that is wasn’t all about the TV broadcast. Most of the marketing folks joined the social media world in a big way. They learned that if they were going to spend that kind of money, then they better not waste it  just on 30 seconds of airtime. As most everyone is now aware, the majority of ads could be viewed before the game on either  the brands’ social media sites and on YouTube’s Ad Blitz Channel. More than half of all ads (57%) that aired during the game this year included a hashtag, such as Chevy’s #SilveradoStrong and Coke’s #AmericaIsBeautiful,. That’s up from 50% last year and 7% the year before when Audi was the first by including the hashtag #ProgressIs at the end of it’s 60 second spot.

As Facebook turns 10 years old this week, they are also celebrating that they got five specific mentions in Super Bowl ads, compared to Twitter’s four. Twitter however reported that during Sunday’s telecast more than 24.9 million Tweets about the game and halftime show were sent. I have to admit that I started following the Tweets on Twitter, but found there was no way to keep up with them and watch the game and the ads at the same time. I found many Tweets that were not even related to the game or the ads, but used a relevant hashtag anyhow.

A brand new Twitter sweepstakes was announced during the first ad after the game ended by the folks at Esurance, the online insurance company. They stated that it cost them $1.5 million less, (about 30%) to run the ad after the game then during it, so instead they are awarding one lucky winner that money.  To participate you had to tweet the hashtag #EsuranceSave30 and post the Tweet by 1 pm PT on Tuesday in order to be eligible for the random drawing. I posted it and I haven’t been notified yet that I won. They are planning to announce the winner on Jimmy Kimmel Live! later today.

This campaign is now being called the best ever in Super Bowl history. There were 1 billion impressions that Esurance received online in less than 48 hours following the SuperBowl, which made it the most viewed and talked about event of the year. 200,000 Esurance tweets were sent out in the one minute after the game. Here’s
mine:

Danny Miller from Esurance stated that as of yesterday they had more than 2.9 million #EsuranceSave30 tweets and they were the #1 Twitter trend in the U.S. for most of the day. They also saw a big spike in traffic to the Esurance website as well as had 50 articles written about them, not including this post.  He stated that Esurance has run many contests and sweepstakes on social media in the past, and they will continue to do so.

So will this promotion now result in many other brands running a similar campaign that integrates TV with social media? We would love to see more promotions advertised on TV, but not all have to have a $1.5 million dollar prize to be a success. The big question as always is, will Esurance also see a spike in their sales? Oreo did after their Tweet last year during the Super Bowl, so we’ll have to wait and see if Esurance shares that information.

I also wanted to mention who the winners were in a couple of the other contests that were integrated with the Super Bowl telecast. I picked the winners correctly in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. “Time Machine” by Ryan Andersen got my vote and his ad ran in the first quarter of the game and was the $1 million dollar First Place winner. “The Cowboy Kid” by Amber Gill I felt would have great public appeal and that ad ran towards the end of the fourth quarter as was the Second Place winner who received $50,000. Congrats to both winners.

The other winner I want to congratulate is from the Intuit Small Business, Big Game Contest. The judges here had narrowed it down to four Finalists and would run an ad during the game for the grand prize winner that the brand’s agency created specifically for that small business. The votes came in and GoldieBlox, a small business that makes construction toys for girls to encourage more female engineers is the winner. This was one of the few commercials we did not see until it ran during  game. Congratulations Debbie, the CEO,  and to the entire team at GoldieBlox.

That’s a wrap for Super Bowl 48. Check back next week as we provide some promotional marketing insights into the Sochi Winter Olympic Games.