Super Bowl Advertising on the Big Screen and Small Screen – Creatives Matter

Are Super Bowls ads worth the 5.6Mil per 30 seconds? We think for many they are, especially for campaigns with memorable messages. And small screen digital buys can support TV buys and provide bigger payoff for the whole campaign. We sampled some national advertisers who ran Superbowl ads and also ran on our marketplace, and saw that running in the Big Game paid off online as well.

For Super Bowl advertisers who also ran on the Yieldmo Marketplace, we measured attention before and after the Super Bowl.  Using Yieldmo’s AEROS Attention Analytics we measured the real time ways users interacted with the ads before and after the Big Game to see if there were changes to the ads’  attention rates. What we found? Better believe there were!

The Numbers

*Yieldmo’s attention rate is calculated based on a number of attention signals which include gestures such as phone tilts, scrolls, and touches of the creative format. Our analysis does not reflect the overall or relative ranking of these ads, but rather a small sample of the active campaigns that met criteria such as being active on the Yieldmo Marketplace for periods before and after the Super Bowl.

Hyundai’s town’y Smaht Pahk commercial (ranked #2 on USA Today’s Ad Meter) did well in driving 10% more attention on the Yieldmo Marketplace for Hyundai post Super Bowl, and certainly was memorable in our circles because of the funny contributions from Big Papi and the other Bostonian cameos.

Bud Light launched a hard seltzer and managed to also promote its core product by roughing up Post Malone in Get Both (please, go easy on him!) – driving 15% more attention on Marketplace ads.

Toyota’s cinematic Highlander spot featuring the hero mom unshaken by all types of disasters did well, driving an overall lift of 22% on the Yieldmo Marketplace. Surprisingly, attention from these Toyota ads served in Canada increased by 80%! This made sense when we realized that heroine Cobie Smulders was Canadian.

Squarespace’s ad Winona in Winona also generated higher attention rates (21%) for Squarespace’s paid media post Super Bowl. Like much in advertising, it’s a mystery why things do well–was it because  the world loves the small business message Squarespace conveyed in the spot or is it because so many are obsessed with Stranger Things? Further proof that not everything in advertising can be quantified!

One thing we learned for certain–brands with great creative, a comprehensive cross screen strategy and compelling formats can continue to capture attention long after the game is through.

Yieldmo offers attention-catching creative formats along with advanced analytics  with a view into who’s paying attention and when – paired with machine learning and additional tools to optimize toward KPIs . If you’re a brand looking for better ad experiences and a real-time view on the attention your ads are generating, get in touch!