According to NPR, brands spent $7 million for 30 seconds of advertising during the Super Bowl. That’s a lot of cash to shell out. Especially when you consider the fact that the same 30 second ad would run you a little over $800K during Sunday Night Football.
We know the Super Bowl reach is staggering. This year alone, there were over 113 million viewers.
But is it worth it? Are brands getting their return on advertising dollars spent during the Super Bowl?
We’ll dig into that next, but first, let’s talk about ads.
The 3 Best Super Bowl Ads of 2023
There were certainly some memorable commercials. According to the buzz across the internet and our marketing team, here were the 3 best Super Bowl commercials of 2023:
1.) GM and Netflix’s collaboration on “Why Not EV?” which infused Will Ferrell in some of Netflix’s most popular shows was a standout:
2.) SquareSpace’s “The Singularity” ad featuring Adam Driver. As a Marketer, you can’t not love it:
3.) The “Forever” Farmer’s Dog commercial. Warning: This one is a punch in the gut to any dog owner, and will have you sobbing for hours:
While these were great ads, there were a lot of duds. At the risk of offending someone, we won’t name names.
How Many Brands Evaluate Impact of Their TV Ads
Typically, brands measure the reach of their TV Ads by the Nielsen scale, the golden standard used for decades. Nielsen uses something they call, “people meters” to capture how many people are watching per household at any given time.
Niesel is a great resource for determining reach. But there are other crucial channels that can create a lot of buzz and viewership well after it airs. Que, social media.
Luckily, it’s relatively easy to determine the brand impact of your Super Bowl commercial across social media using StatSocial’s social audience insights platform.
Let’s break it down.
Our Step-By-Step Guide To Determine The Brand Impact of Your Super Bowl Commercial Across Social
Our platform gives you access to millions of verified consumers via their publicly declared social data. In layman’s terms? You get a holistic view of your audience based on the information they share about themselves across social channels including their unique:
- Interests and passions
- Brand affinities
- Personality traits
- Influencers they follow
- Preferred media
- Key demographics
From there, determining the brand impact for any marketing campaign is fairly straight-forward. Here’s the step-by-step process:
Step 1: Identify Engaged And Exposed Audiences
In this case, let’s use the GM x Netflix commercial as an example. We want to figure out which audience members saw their Super Bowl ad. We can narrow in on this by seeing which audience members engaged with or were exposed to the social content around the ad:
Step 2: Ask The Engaged And Exposed Social Audience For Feedback
The most effective way to understand the brand impact of any marketing campaign across social? Ask your audience. While social listening tools give you a high-level understanding around the general sentiment, it’s still an educated guess.
If GM and Netflix want to take out the guesswork, they could leverage StatSocial to solicit feedback directly from their audience to find out more about brand awareness and perception changes as a result of the ad. Using StatSocial’s platform GM and Netflix can:
- Match any social audience, (in this case, the audience exposed and engaged with the commercial) to verified individuals. This would allow them to target these individuals across a variety of channels with brand lift surveys.
- Send their audience directly to their paid media partners or have the StatSocial services team reach these individuals directly via email for survey participation.
Step 3: Analyze Results and Optimize Accordingly
Once survey results are in, Netflix x GM can start to understand the impact of their Super Bowl commercial. Then, they can also take a look at the exposed and engaged audiences’ purchase behavior over the next several months to see if they notice an upward trend compared to a control group.
Putting the two pieces together — exposed audience surveying + sales — gives you a very accurate depiction of the brand impact of any marketing campaign you run.
Final Thoughts: Brand Impact
While GM + Netflix’s ad seems to be a clear contender for top Super Bowl commercial of 2023, many ads missed the mark. And as you can see, determining whether the spend was worth it gets far more nuanced.
StatSocial takes the guesswork out of your marketing campaigns so that you know what’s working, and where you need to optimize.
Ready to know your audience and how to make deeper connections with them through your marketing? Let’s chat.