We’ve looked at the numbers, watched the online ads and teasers, read the tweets and Facebook posts, and we’ve chosen the winners in our fifth annual Hashtag Bowl competition.
This year’s announcement comes after quite an internal discussion on who we should crown. For example, Mountain Dew had the most-mentioned hashtag during the game, but more than half the tweets about #puppymonkeybaby were negative, so could we really give them an award? We decided not. Likewise, Esurance had more than two million mentions if you count the full 24-hour period before and after the game, but the company reverted to an old social media tactic — giving away cash in exchange for tweets — and we decided that strategy wasn’t a winner.
Who did we choose? Let’s take a look at the 2016 Hashtag Bowl winners!
Award: Most Mentioned Social Network
Tie: Facebook and Twitter
Technically, Facebook was mentioned in four Super Bowl ads, but two mentions were far less prominent than the Twitter logo appearing in the same ads, so we only gave Facebook a half-point for those. Ergo, the two networks ended up in a 3–3 tie.
Award: Most Creative Social Effort
Winner: Gatorade
Gatorade wasn’t an in-game advertiser, but we were impressed by how the company grabbed attention. The company advertised on Snapchat and turned a football tradition — the end-of-game ritual where players dump Gatorade on their coach — into a Sponsored Lens. Snapchat users were able to give themselves and their friends virtual Gatorade baths, and the company says that lens was seen more than 100 million times.
#SB50 may be over but the #GatoradeDunk @Snapchat lens lives on with 100 million+ views! Get dunked today. pic.twitter.com/1b7FHwE7No — Gatorade (@Gatorade) February 8, 2016
Congrats, Gatorade: Clever idea and well-executed.
Award: Best Brand Tweet
Winner: Pabst Blue Ribbon
As expected, the social media teams from major brands were ready for action during the Super Bowl. There was a lot of brand-to-brand conversation on Twitter, and not all of it was polite.
But there’s one tweet that stood out to us and it came from the venerable beer company, Pabst Blue Ribbon. After seeing the Bud Light commercial in which Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer join the tongue-in-cheek “Bud Light Party,” the Pabst social team quickly posted this photo of Rogen opening a can of Pabst.
Before he was paid to join a party… pic.twitter.com/X2ldX4isiI — Pabst Blue Ribbon (@PabstBlueRibbon) February 8, 2016
Twitter users liked it as much as we did — those thousands of likes and retweets are exponentially higher than the couple dozen interactions that most of Pabst’s more recent tweets tend to get.
Well played, Pabst, and definitely worthy of our choice for Best Brand Tweet during the Super Bowl.
On behalf of the entire Marketing Land/Search Engine Land editorial team, congratulations to Pabst, Gatorade, Facebook and Twitter — our winners in the 2016 Marketing Land Hashtag Bowl. And for all the brands that didn’t win, take note: We’ll be back again next year, so you have 11 months to prepare to win the 2017 Hashtag Bowl.
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