Superbowl is traditionally ranked the biggest day of TV for advertisers. Three million dollars for 30 seconds of spot may sound like an exorbitant amount of money, but it provides an avenue to reach an audience of over 100 million viewers. There were lots of varieties & themes in these year’s advertisements. So which ones clicked with the audience and which ones missed?

Over the superbowl week-end, we used Context Mine to gauge social media reaction to various commercials that were aired during & before the game.  We started measuring various commercials few days before it were aired to record pre-buzz of some of those campaigns. Our pre game buzz analysis includes recording twitter sentiment for those commercials from Friday, 2/2/2010 onwards till about 2:00pm EST when the superbowl pregame shows began airing.  Our post game buzz analysis records sentiment from 2:00pm EST on game day till about 2:00pm EST the following day.

In terms of pre game buzz, Motorola, Groupon, Volkswagen, Doritos, and Audi had some of the most discussed commercials on twitter.  And those commercials continued to generate lot of post game buzz as well. During and after the game, Groupon was leading the way in terms of overall number of conversations, but as I had highlighted in my previous post here, plenty of it was negative. Chrysler’s Eminem/Detroit commercial which had scant pre game buzz was also one of the most talked about ads on twitter-verse during and after the game.

While veterans of super bowl commercials like Budweiser, Pepsi, Go Daddy continued to fill out the top-buzzed list, couple of new comers like Best Buy, Bridgestone managed to grab plenty of attention as well. Here is our list:

I think there are still questions as to whether superbowl buzz is going to translate into increase in sales and revenues for those advertisers. It will also be interesting to watch whether negative buzz surrounding Groupon’s commercial is going to have much impact in long term.  Superbowl XLV is over. But for companies and their advertisers, social media monitoring efforts to gain insights into customer conversation,  and in turn responding to their concerns and complaints does not end with superbowl.