The Super Bowl Second Screen Match

At the time of writing, the nation TV ratings of the NFL Super Bowl XLVIII have not yet come out. As for the estimated numbers from the coverage, according to Newsday, “… 56 major markets, showed an average of 47.6 percent of homes in those markets watched the game, the fifth-best such rating on record.” My assessment is 20% beer lovers, 20% cheese lovers, 20% conformers under peer pressure, 20% diehard football fans, 20% hardworking social media enthusiasts who were glued to their second screens during the game.  In case you fall into the category of a beer lover, totally fine, you probably would like a recap of the glorious social media moments during last night’s game.

In terms of the Super Bowl’s biggest social media triumphant, ever, everybody will unanimously think of “Dunk in the Dark” by Oreo. Shamefully, there is not a mature analysis system to measure the sales that famous tweet gained Oreo – in actual numbers; however, on top of the tens of thousands of retweets Oreo tracked in the first hour, shares to other platforms, headlines on all publications, and the fact that a year later, people are still talking about the Oreo-licious night, it was a genius move (at least I went out and got a packet of Oreo the next day). In a conservative calculation, Oreo may have paid their behind-the-screen warriors and graphic design team several thousand dollars or more for the tweet promotion, but nothing is considerable compared to the $4 million, record high, 30-second spot cost during the game. In short, we all saw real-time marking calling at that moment where Oreo became culturally relevant.

Oreo

Let’s relive that remarkable, legendary “Oreo Moment” in the second screen history:

Firstly, let’s see how Oreo did this year during the game and if their team had overdone themselves:

For Twitter:

Like Oreo promised, it was all dark and inactive during this year’s game. Perhaps their social media geniuses were all promoted after last year; therefore, nobody handled their accounts in 2014.

Esurance

Here is Twitter’s trending chart from last night (and it’s still there 12 hours later):

What stood out was Esurance:

Esurance ran its Super Bowl after the game, which was 30% cheaper. What did they decide to do with the $1.5 million surplus? Give it to one random, lucky Twitter fan that used the hashtag #EsuranceSave30 during the assigned hours.

JCPenney

The one tweet that made us all scratch our heads was from JCPenney:

If you ever need to explain your joke flat-out, then it’s a failure. However, they need to thank the replies from their rivals that helped JC Penney ease up the embarrassment. Before JCPenney sent out the explanation tweet afterward, Kia responded so cleverly:

Speaking of Kia Motors, they did a swell job at interacting with other brands:

Conclusion

All of the above big name brands I just mentioned, none of them really cared to do much on Facebook during the game – it was either zero activity or a link to direct followers to their Twitter page. Reuters predicted that Facebook, about five times the size of Twitter, was going to steal Twitter’s real-time conversation thunder during this year’s game. In my opinion, Twitter still won the Super Bowl Second Screen Match.

I would love to welcome you to join the conversation. Which one was your favorite tweet? Did I miss out on any brilliant Facebook posts? Please leave your appreciated thoughts in the comment section below.