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February 10, 2017

Digital Clarketing: What We Learned From Super Bowl Weekend

woman-samsung-alpha-taking-picture-39000For marketers, Super Bowl Sunday will never be the same. There was a time when talking Budweiser frogs were all the rage at the water cooler on Monday morning. That has been replaced with a 24-hour Snapchat Lens of a Gatorade cooler that you could virtually dump over your head. The times, they are a changin’. Here are a few developments we learned about last weekend.

Brands Took Their Stands

Our very own Ali Kehoe wrote in a blog last month that Generation Z, born after 1995, are more apt to show brand loyalty to companies that align with their own personal values in terms of corporate responsibility. Airbnb, Audi and 84 Lumber used Super Bowl Sunday to boldly push their own brand values from immigration to the gender wage gap.

The ‘Surprise Element’ Is All but Gone

Cable may be losing subscribers by the millions, but the Super Bowl will always be the biggest event in entertainment. For content marketers, that isn’t enough. Social media advertising and the fear of missing a viewer on cable have caused most brands to tease and release their Super Bowl spots days (and even weeks) in advance. This was again the case in 2017. Seeing Mr. Clean provocatively dirty up my Instagram timeline was definitely a surprise, but it lost its effect on Super Bowl Sunday.

Twitter Takes Center Stage

Twitter takes some flack from time to time, but the Super Bowl is when the platform shines. There were almost 28 million tweets from 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. This spike was fueled by brands encouraging user conversation. Hashtags such as Airbnb’s #WeAccept and #BoycottBudweiser created social and political commentary while P&G used Twitter to communicate with other brands during the game.