Super Bowl Advertising Winners and Losers
By Anna Johnson on February 9th, 2009In an effort to measure ad effectiveness, Internet research company Compete measured the increases in website traffic to each of the Super Bowl advertisers’ websites on Super Bowl Sunday.
While the ads weren’t necessarily calculated to send people to a website (although some arguably were), the traffic trends indicate some level of brand awareness / cut-through and are therefore a worthy indicator of who ran successful, and not so successful, ads during the Super Bowl.
Based on Compete’s estimates of traffic, here are the changes experienced by each of the top 5 and bottom 5 advertisers on Super Bowl Sunday:
Top five:
- Denny’s – 1,679 percent more traffic to dennys.com.
- Frito-Lay – 313 percent more traffic to cheetos.com.
- PepsiCo – 199 percent more traffic to refresheverything.com.
- Annheuser-Busch – 148 percent more traffic to budweiser.com.
- PepsiCo – 143 percent more traffic to gatorade.com.
Bottom five:
- Etrade – 57 percent less traffic to etrade.com.
- Cars.com – 22 percent less traffic to cars.com.
- CareerBuilder.com – 17 percent less traffic to careerbuilder.com.
- Coca-Cola – 16 percent less traffic to cocacola.com.
- TacoBell – 7 percent less traffic to tacobell.com.
Companies such as Cars.com and CareerBuilder.com should be particularly disappointed, given that their ads would have specifically aimed to generate website traffic.
Source: Matt Pace, “Super Bowl Ad Effectiveness: Who Scored with Viewers?” Compete Blog, February 6, 2009
