Here Are The Top 10 Brands Scoring Positive Comments From Super Bowl Ads

From the Coca-Cola commercial

There were plenty of social comments on Sunday’s Super Bowl ads, but which brands made the best connections with consumers?

Those connections, says the social analytics firm Networked Insights, are represented by the biggest increase in positive social comments around the airing of the brand’s ad.

By that measure, Esurance claimed the top position in Networked Insights’ rankings by generating an enormous Positive Emotional Expression from its Super Bowl ad. Of its 2.3 million brand mentions in social media during the 24-hour period starting at 6 a.m. CT on Sunday, more than 107,000 were positive comments.

This resulted in an astounding 799,509 percent Positive Emotional Lift. The increase is compared to a base measurement period of 14 random days in January.

Rick Miller, vice president for customer insights at the Chicago-based Networked Insights, told me this rocket boost was due to the fact that Esurance normally receives almost no positive comments about itself.

“Online insurance company Esurance demonstrated once again that it’s possible to buy friends with its cash giveaway campaign built around Super Bowl 50,” he told me via email. “The seldom-talked-about company thrust its way into consumer consciousness — at least for a short while — with its retweet-to-win contest.”

He noted that “among the brands not paying for friends,” Budweiser scored one of the best product plugs in Super Bowl history when Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning “declared on national TV that he was going to celebrate his unexpected win — and contemplate his retirement –- while ‘drinking a lot of Budweiser.’ ”

Technically, his endorsement wasn’t part of Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad, but Networked Insights counted it as part of the overall brand lift from the game. Budweiser swears it didn’t pay him for the plug.

Including the Manning assist, Budweiser scored more than 185,000 brand mentions, with 8,700+ positive emotional expressions and a very respectable 5,500-percent lift over the previous month.

There was no clear loser this year, Miller said, unlike Nationwide’s disastrous ad in last year’s game. He said that, while each of the top 10 brands received some negative comments (see chart below), the vast majority are neutral in tone, as in “check this out.” The comments came from Twitter, publicly available comments on Facebook, commenting platforms like Disqus and blogs and forums on WordPress or Tumblr.

Here’s Networked Insights’ ranking of the top 10 brands that generated the most positive comments from their Super Bowl ads:

Source: Networked Insights’ General Consumer Audience

And here are the ads: Esurance, Budweiser, T-Mobile #1 and T-Mobile #2, Pepsi (half-time sponsorship), Captain America: Civil War, Doritos #1 and Doritos #2, The Jungle Book, Taco Bell, Amazon, and Coca-Cola.

A brand like Coke, Miller said, dropped in its emotional lift because it normally receives more positive comments, an average of about 2,500 per day.

Networked Insights’ platform obviously made some judgment calls about what’s a positive emotion and what’s negative. For example, their software judged as a positive comment someone commenting that they hoped to win the Esurance offering:

And a negative emotion for Budweiser might be someone complaining that he wanted to see more Clydesdales: