Brands can win and lose when it comes to customer engagement related to commercials that aired during Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIX broadcast.
Rick Miller, Vice President of Customer Analytics for Networked Insights, said in a report titled, “Which Super Bowl Advertisers Earned the Best Emotional Response from Consumers? And Why?” that brands can win AND lose with their Super Bowl ads.
No brand encapsulated that better than Nationwide.
“Nationwide Insurance, a brand that doesn’t typically generate much emotional reaction from consumers, won big with Mindy Kaling, and then lost big with their ad about preventable childhood accidents,” Miller said.
But Miller said Nationwide was near the top of every customer engagement/emotional connection category his company measures before “the accident” commercial known as “Make Safe Happen.”
The commercial triggered backlash, Miller said, along with a severe uptick in hatred/anger/disgust comments and a 49,100% increase in confusion among viewers. He said the gains Nationwide made with Mindy Kaling were “far more offset” by the “Make Safe Happen” spot.
Measuring consumers’ emotional response to major brand events like the Super Bowl, Miller said, is a “powerful and more realistic way to measure the success or failure of a branding campaign and get a better understanding of which components of the campaign worked.”
Networked Insights studied four groups of positive customer engagement emotions: Amusement, excitement/joy, love/like/happiness, and trust.
The four groups of negative emotions studied were: Boredom, confusion, hatred/disgust/anger; and offense.
Loctite, Kia, and Always came away from Super Bowl XLIX as the big winners, Miller said.
“Loctite, a very small brand in terms of typical consumer discussion bet big and won big,” he said. “Consumers proclaimed their ad ‘weird in a good way’ and professed unbridled happiness toward the reggae beat and the idea that glue could fix almost anything.”
Regarding pure changes in volume of conversation, McDonald’s climbed in the rankings.
“McDonald’s promotion of ‘paying with love’ clearly prompted a likewise emotional reaction among consumers,” Miller said in the report. “Budweiser saw great engagement with ‘Lost Dog,’ but ironically their success may not show as strongly in the numbers because so many people saw the ad before Super Bowl Sunday.”
There are several ways to measure success, Miller said. Small brands can see phenomenal percentage gains with a well-crafted ad; Loctite, Always, and WeatherTech were brands that accomplished that this year.
“Larger brands will see smaller percentage increases, but instead see increases in thousands of conversations on a pure volume perspective,” Miller said. “McDonald’s and Coke were two brands this year that did so. Brands can win and lose at the same time. Nationwide epitomized this this year.”