A picture from outside of U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.
PHOTO: Tony Webster

The Philadelphia Eagles made headlines in last night’s Super Bowl at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, when they defeated the New England Patriots 41-33 for their first Super Bowl championship.

But in the analytics world, sentiment, hashtags, advertisements and social listening were the story. The Super Bowl draws more than 100 million viewers on average (check out last night's ratings) and upwards of $400 million in advertising spend (TV spots average more than $5 million for a 30-second spot) for the yearly championship game. According to Sprout Social, fans sent approximately 6.3 million Super Bowl-related social media messages last night.

We caught up with some companies deploying analytics around the Super Bowl to determine what they measured and analytics lessons learned.

Sprinklr: Advertising's Impact

Sprinklr, a customer experience and social media analytics software provider, measured the most popular hashtags and brand mentions for the over 35 major Super Bowl commercials in its Sprinklr Brand Bowl, which ranked the top 15 most talked about commercials and top influencers discussing the ads. The website updated in real time, presenting data from Twitter, Instagram public hashtags, Reddit, YouTube and Tumblr, which the company started collecting on Jan. 28 using its Listening Insights solution.

Sprinklr measured the Super Bowl activity because the company saw it as a “great opportunity to get a real snapshot of the real social impact ads can have on consumers.”

Sprinklr released the Twitter hashtag data this morning, with Avocados from Mexico leading the way with 130,000 mentions:

  • Avocados from Mexico (#guacworld): 130,000+ mentions
  • Tide (#Tide): 108,000+ mentions
  • Pepsi (#CindyCrawford): 55,000+ mentions
  • T-Mobile (#unlimitedmoves): 42,000+ mentions
  • Doritos (#spitfire): 28,000+ mentions
  • Budweiser (#thisbudsforyou): 23,000+ mentions
  • Westworld (#WestWorld): 18,000+ mentions
  • Bud Light (#DillyDilly): 18,000+ mentions
  • Kraft (#FamilyGreatly): 13,000+ mentions
  • Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (#thankgodimacountryboy): 12,000+ mentions

Sprout Social: Inspire Beyond Your Product

Another analytics lesson from the Super Bowl? Don’t focus solely on product to promote your brand and make money. 

Social media listening company Sprout Social released data that found 44 percent of consumers will purchase more from a brand that takes a stand on social/political issues they agree with; 52 percent will show greater brand loyalty; 35 percent will recommend the brand to friends/family and 28 percent will publicly promote/praise the brand.

Some examples during the Super Bowl included:

The US Olympics encouraged girls to always be faster than the boys:

Budweiser spotlighted its hurricane disaster relief efforts:

Stella Artois promoted its ongoing partnership with Water.org to give clean water to underdeveloped countries:

Kristin Johnson, director of communications for Sprout Social, said events like the Super Bowl can provide impactful analytics because it, “unearths who is talking about what, where they are located and general sentiment.” 

“As a brand marketer,” Johnson said, “you can apply these types of analyses on a smaller scale, in endless ways. Whether you are looking to grow your audience, fine-tune your strategy, improve your social team’s performance or show the business impact of social, analytics will help pave the way.”    

Talkwalker: Eagles Won Chatter Battle Too

Listening and analytics provider Talkwalker found 5.3 million mentions of the Super Bowl on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on Sunday alone.

The Eagles won the mentions battle:

  • 1.4 million mentions of the Philadelphia Eagles
  • 804,700 mentions of the New England Patriots

The teams weren’t the only show, with 1 million online mentions of halftime act Justin Timberlake, and 117,200 mentions of his tribute to Minneapolis hometown hero, Prince. 

Talkwalker’s analytics also found the Super Bowl has clearly become a global event, with people discussing the game in:

  • Brazil: 186,800 mentions
  • Mexico: 172,100 mentions
  • UK: 147,700 mentions
  • Canada: 129,100 mentions

Tide won the Super Bowl commercials in online mentions with its ad featuring David Harbour from Netflix hit "Stranger Things." There were 163,800 mentions of Tide during the Super Bowl. However, Tide only 11,000 of those mentions featured the #TidePodChallenge:

Todd Grossman, CEO of Talkwalker Americas, said monitoring trends like this can help marketers evaluate their brand health and reputation. “An aggregate of data around a brand can help uncover new trends, spot a growing crisis or engage in some competitive intelligence,” Grossman said.

Salesforce: Introducing Einstein to Super Bowl Analytics

Salesforce also deployed social listening analytics on the Super Bowl and looked for the first time at what types of images viewers posted with its Einstein Vision for Social Studio, according to Robert Begg, vice president of product marketing for social and advertising products at the CRM giant.

The company also leveraged the Marketing Cloud social media marketing product, Social Studio, to gather insights. It found: 

Top Twitter hashtags:

  • #Guacworld
  • #Sweepstakes
  • #Teamtabasco

Top Twitter words:

  • GuacWorld
  • TeamTabasco
  • Trucks

Top Twitter images:

Cindy Crawford from the Pepsi ad:

Justin Timberlake from the halftime show:

Bud Light shot from the Tag Your Bud Knight ad:

“The social media analytics gained from real-time listening enables marketers to better understand how consumers are engaging with their brands, their campaigns and products,” Begg said when asked how marketers can leverage analytics from an event like the Super Bowl. “From there, marketers can use the information to deliver personalized communications, offers and content to consumers, as well as look for opportunities to engage one-on-one with them across social media.”

Looker: Predictive Insights

Looker released some pre-Super Bowl prediction analytics which predicted a final score of: New England 27, Philadelphia 24. Can't win them all.

Daniel Mintz, Looker’s chief data evangelist, said his company has an ongoing partnership with KNBR, San Francisco’s sports radio station, and figured it would dig into the Super Bowl data pre-game. 

“Sports is a fun place to look for analytic insight because it’s so accessible and so well covered,” Mintz told CMSWire. “Especially with the popularity of fantasy sports, the trove of raw statistics that’s out there has just exploded recently. But most of our customers aren’t sports teams, though we do have a couple.”

The big lesson for analytics here, Super Bowl or not? There are always helpful insights “hiding in the data,” as Mintz put it. Looker’s customers, he added, “are businesses who have all this data but don’t have any way to make sense of it.”