Who Won The Super Bowl Ad War? It Depends On How You Measure

This year’s back-and-forth Super Bowl eventually produced a winner on the field, with Kansas City coming from behind to capture their first championship in a half-century. As for the $435 million question of which brands and advertising spots won the night’s battle for attention - that’s not as easily settled. Today’s advanced advertising metrics platforms all offer different insights into the performance of spots with different audiences, all depending on what you’re trying to measure and what brands are trying to achieve.

According to TVision, a platform that is able to measure who is in the room and whose eyes are on screen when spots air, the back-and-forth game kept viewers tuned in end-to-end. Attention increased throughout the game, rising to its highest level during the fourth quarter among both male and female viewers.

The company also ranked which ad spots held viewers’ interest as they aired, using a baseline of 100 for average attention. According to their measurement, Tide’s "Finally Later, #LaundryLater" won the most eyeballs with a 109.4 Attention Index, followed by Michelob Ultra’s "Jimmy Works It Out" (108.7), Planter "Baby Nut" (107.8), Discover "Yes We're Accepted" (107.3) and No Time To Die (106.7) Rocket Mortgage, Doritos, Audi, Facebook and Disney+ rounded out the top ten.

Another measure of a spot’s popularity is how many people engaged with ads online, before, during and after the big game. Google and YouTube provided some measurements of searches and views, noting that viewership of Super Bowl ads on YouTube during the game rose about 30% from last year, and viewership of Super Bowl ads on YouTube during the game rose over 70% on TV screens (vs. mobile or desktop screens) from last year. 

According to YouTube, the spots getting the most gameday views through 10pm ET on Sunday were Amazon’s “Before Alexa” spot featuring Ellen DeGeneres Facebook’s “Facebook Groups Ready to Rock?”, Jeep’s “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray recreating his classic movie role, and Hyundai’s Masshole-powered “Smaht Pahk” spot. T-Mobile, Pepsi, Quibi and Kia also racked up the online views.

iSpot TV measures overall social engagement, and their metrics showed there was a very clear winner on gameday. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Bill Murray’s Jeep spot racked up a 14.58% digital share of voice on nearly 75,000 total social actions. That was nearly double the #2 ranked spot, Facebook Groups (featuring Sylvester Stalone and Chris Rock), which snagged an 8% digital share of voice on 32,800 social actions. Other buzzworthy spots according to iSpot’s metrics were GMC, Disney+, Marvel’s Black Widow, Google Assistant, and President Trump’s re-election commercial on criminal justice reform.

ListenFirst Media, another platform measuring social engagement - apparently using a different methodology - came up with a very different winners’ circle. The NFL topped their ranking of most-buzzed-about brands, with a 21.5% share, followed by Pepsi (20.3%), President Trump (12.3%), T-Mobile (7.89%) and Planters (5%).

Overall, Super Bowl LIV advertisers paid out about $435 million, far surpassing 2017’s record $390 million spend, according to a preliminary estimate of in-game ad expenditures by the analyst firm Kantar Media. That bought a total of 51 minutes, 15 seconds of national commercial time from paying sponsors, the NFL and Fox-owned networks, accounting for 24% of total broadcast time.

If those spots seemed longer, it wasn’t your imagination. 24 of the 59 spots during the game ran 60+ seconds, up from a high of 23 in 2014.

As usual, most of the spots focused on cars, beer, snack foods and consumer products. Anheuser Busch InBev was the top marketer in the game, spending an estimated $41 million. PepsiCo was the runner up at $31 million spread across its Cheetos, Doritos, Mountain Dew, SodaStream and Pepsi brands, followed by Procter & Gamble at $30 million and Amazon at $26 million. Carmakers spent a total of $77 million to buy 7:30 of commercial time to get viewers to see themselves behind the wheel of a new Jeep, Hyundai, Kia, GMC or other vehicle.