BrandBowl: Twitter's response to the Super bowl's Ads

During this year's Super bowl, there was another competition taking place that captured the attention of Twitter users all across the U.S.

No, I'm not talking about PuppyBowl. I'm referring to the battle of the brands: BrandBowl, hosted on Twitter by Mullen and Radian6. Using a special hashtag - #brandbowl (a Twitter user's way of organizing similar tweets), the two agencies were able to track the thoughts and tweets of viewers worldwide in real time. At several points in the evening, #brandbowl even became a trending topic, meaning that the hashtag was among the top ten most mentioned words across the world on Twitter.


So how did the brands that advertised during the big game fare in this battle? According to the competition's site, Doritos took home the top honor thanks to their consumer-generated (crowd-sourced) spots. My favorite spot of the Doritos set was "House Rules" with the adorable, mom-protecting, date-scaring kiddo. Interestingly, Doritos hosted it’s own competition called “Crash the Superbowl” wherein consumers sent in their home-made spots in hopes of getting it voted high enough on the Doritos site to be aired during the game, but also in hopes of taking the top spots on USA Today’s Ad Meter. The top three :30 spots took home additional prize money. The genius in this is that Doritos used a social media, user-engagement platform to select commercials that they didn’t even have to create. Furthermore, when the spots took home the top rankings, both the brand and the consumer won. What is that called again? A win-win-win-win situation, I think?

Second place was Google with their simple storytelling of “Parisian Love”. The spot elegantly pulled at the heartstrings while also demonstrating the features of Google, all told from within the search box. As Google’s first TV spot, this was a home run for the search engine brand.

Third was Focus on the Family with their Tim Tebow spot taking a stance against abortion. As Joe mentioned before, this spot got more PR value than any other brand due to its obviously controversial nature. While other spots were voted up because of their humor or cleverness or emotional value, quite frankly, I believe this spot landed in at number three for none of those reasons. Simply put, everyone was talking about it and that was enough to bubble it up to the top.

Other brands that landed high on BrandBowl 2010: Snickers, Budweiser, Bud Light, Hyundai, Kia, GoDaddy, and Coca-Cola. As Joe mentioned, the worst spot of the night was clearly GoDaddy's, so it's likely that the #brandbowl hashtag was used to report how much everyone hated their overdone tactics of hot girls selling domain names.

Since BrandBowl 2010 only tracks buzz, and was unable to capture opinions on a larger scale, it's difficult to say that these spots were "the best" or "the most popular" or even "the winners."

But the Twitterverse spoke and they definitely took home top honors for the "most tweeted."