Which Ad Really Won The Super Bowl?
February 15, 2012
I was talking with Rich Wakefield, our ECD, about the two very different ratings systems for evaluating Super Bowl spots every year. USA Today has consumers voting online, picking from a list of all 55 spots.
Then there’s the industry experts’ take, with Ad Age’s annual list.
Both publications are rating the same ads, but they always pick two different winners. USA Today says it’s “Sling Baby” by Doritos. AdAge gave their highest score to Kia’s “A Dream Car For Real Life.” Their systems are flawed because they’re not inclusive. It’s like arguing which NFL team is best only by looking at offense, or only at defense.
Rich and I wondered how often spots resonate with both Main Street and Madison Avenue. It’s incredibly difficult, of course, but you have to do everything you can to inspire your mom to love a spot just as much as the Cannes judges. VW Super Bowl commercial with the Darth Vader kid managed to do that last year, scoring high with consumers and earning accolades at the industry’s most respected award shows.
We were curious whether any of this year’s Super Bowl spots did that. We had a conversation with Louis Riccardi and Rachel Oliner, a few of our researchers, and figured out a way to combine the data from both ratings systems.
But after crunching the data, we realized social media should be factored into our ratings as well. It’s become a major part of Super Bowl marketing, and to be crowned a champion, you should have to prove you have game in the social arena. So we ran the data again, this time incorporating Deep Focus’ scores, which grade each spot on how well it used social to engage viewers.
Congratulations to Bud Light’s “Rescue Dog,” earning the highest overall combined score. The ad experts loved it. Aunt Edna loved it. And it rocked social media in a major way.
NOTE TO STATISTICS FANS: We took the average of each ad individually across the 3 ratings, and then computed a grand average for all 5 of the composite averages. We then subtracted the grand average from each of those composite averages; those results are in the "Neiman Score" column. That’s what determined the overall rank of each ad.