What Brands Can Learn From The Super Bowl – A New Report From SIA and Synthesio

The Ipsos Social Intelligence Analytics (SIA) team recently partnered with Synthesio to support the Creative Excellence team in their annual review of the top Super Bowl commercials, and also dig deeper using the Synthesio social listening tools and AICI platform to uncover insights that will be invaluable to brands.

After crunching the numbers, the team distilled down its findings into five key insights about this year’s Super Bowl that provided greater meaning into the commercials that consumers were inclined to watch, the product categories that performed the best, the conversations triggered by the halftime show, and the nostalgic experiences and perspectives shared across generations. Here are a few highlights.

Commercials Insight: People Discussed Their Emotional Connections to the Super Bowl Ads Significantly More than the Actual Content Itself

The SIA team analyzed Super Bowl commercial discussions from both consumers and journalists over many years and discovered that there were mainly 10 themes (and hundreds of expressions driving each of those themes) discussed the most. Emotion was the most discussed theme in Super Bowl LVI:

Source: Synthesio, 02/01/22 – 02/14/22, public global mentions relevant to Super Bowl, English only

This year’s Super Bowl saw Emotion ranked highest. In particular, mixed emotions, from confusion and skepticism to excitement and an element of surprise, emanated from the cryptocurrency ads that aired during the Super Bowl for the first time ever.

Category Insight: The Cryptocurrency Category Generated the Greatest Buzz but Curiosity Crashed Coinbase’s App

The SIA team allocated all of the Super Bowl commercials by their respective product categories and then measured the social volume of the categories themselves. As can be seen, the cryptocurrency category commercials surpassed the second highest product category, automotive commercials, by almost half.

Source: Synthesio, 02/13/22 – 02/14/22, public global mentions relevant to Super Bowl, English only

Among the four cryptocurrency commercials, Coinbase’s QR Code spot led the share of voice within this category at 62.2%, thus receiving the most social media buzz and attention, followed by FTX’s “Don’t Miss Out with Larry David” spot at 18%, Crypto.com’s commercial featuring Lebron James meeting his younger self at 13.2%, and lastly eToro’s “Flying Your Way” commercial at 6.6%.

Snackable Insight: Snacks are a Super Bowl Staple But Most Ads Created More Crunch Than Buzz

The “Snack” category was the fifth ranked among all 17 product categories for the most talked about commercials on the day of the Super Bowl.

Expanding upon the cryptocurrency product category analysis that we conducted, the SIA team also focused on the CPG Snacks category consisting of four commercials that ran during the Super Bowl from these brands: Cheetos & Doritos, Lay’s, Planters and Pringles.

This analysis included a fresh demographic insight we uncovered after conducting comparative analytics across these four snack brands.

Click here to read our full Super Bowl Insights Report to see this snackable insight, more exclusive insights including those around culture, diversity, and race, substantive supporting verbatims, and rich data visualizations invaluable to brands and the agencies that support them.