Ads Made Up 30% of Super Bowl Tweets

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Of the 20.9 million Super Bowl-related tweets sent during the game Sunday evening, nearly 30% were about the ads, according to digital consulting agency Whispr Group.

A good ad didn't necessarily mean more tweets. GoDaddy's ad, in which model Bar Refaeli makes out, rather grotesquely, with an overweight "nerd," netted 290,000 reactions on Twitter — 126,000 more than the runner-up, Budweiser. However, that chatter proved mostly negative. In fact, only 14% of the tweets about GoDaddy during the game were termed "positive," whereas every other brand noted in the study had a positive rating of 60% or higher.

In most cases, the ads did not significantly impact brands' followings on Twitter. Taco Bell and Budweiser brought in the most new followers — around 10,000 apiece — followed by Oreo, whose timely, blackout-related tweet helped it attract 7,700 new followers. Oreo spent approximately half the amount of money on commercial advertising that Taco Bell and Budweiser did. Even then, it cost Oreo about $495 per new Twitter follower.

Overall, Taco Bell's "Viva Young" ad, in which a group of retirement-age men and women sneak out for a night of clubbing, tatooing and (of course) late-night Taco Bell snacking, emerged victorious on Twitter, scoring the highest across all categories for volume of tweets, positive sentiment, new followers and ROI.

Other agencies recorded much higher Twitter activity during the matchup. Twitter itself says 24.1 million Super-Bowl related tweets were sent during the game and half time, excluding mentions of ads. Nielsen's SocialGuide tallied 26.1 million tweets overall, noting that the game generated almost as much Twitter activity as all three Presidential Debates combined.