1. GoDaddy

Godaddy.com proved once again that sex sells with their two “racy” (or as racy as can be shown on TV) Super Bowl commercials. Or rather, they proved that sex at least gets people talking. While they were able to lead the way with mentions among the 25 influencers, not a single one was positive and only two were neutral. Among their negative comments were comments such as “Just go away, Go Daddy,” “I hate GoDaddy,” and “At this point, are parents more worried about GoDaddy’s use of semi-scandalous nudity or its terrible trolling?” In fact, even a comment I labeled as neutral took a shot at GoDaddy by calling their branding “silly” before mentioning “their domain service is good though.”

So in general, the sentiment was that GoDaddy may have good domain service, but that their commercials are unnecessarily over the top. But this doesn’t mean, in my opinion, that GoDaddy would be better off with a duller commercial. After all, you have to remember what they’re selling. They’re selling domain service. That’s pretty dull to begin with. The sentiment might not be positive, but for a domain service to be leading in total buzz around the Super Bowl, that’s pretty impressive. So I’m calling this a win for GoDaddy.

2. Bud Light

Bud Light and Super Bowl commercials are almost synonymous. They always purchase a bunch of commercial slots every year and have had such classics as “magic fridge.” This year was no exception, at least in terms of the quantity of Super Bowl commercials they aired, totaling 6 this year.  In the bunch, there were some good ones. One tweet talked about how USA Today rated Bud Light’s “Weego” commercial, with Weego, a dog that fetches Bud Light, #1, while #10 on the Super Bowl a-list Ken Fang gave the “Weego” commercial a solid B.

However, I still think Bud Light would be disappointed by the sentiment around their commercials because the reaction to their commercials for their new product “Bud Light Platinum” was less than favorable. Quotes included “Bud Light Platinum? I don’t think so” and “Whose performance has been more disappointing thus far — the Patriots or Anheuser-Busch,” while Fang gave the two “Platinum” commercials a C and a C- respectively. Considering they ran two commercials in order to get some positive publicity for their new product, Budweiser would probably not be happy to know that some of the most influential Super Bowl writers are not talking favorably about their new product.

3. Chevy

Chevy ran 3 ads for three separate brands – the Silverado, the Camaro, and the Sonic. They actually had the most total positive mentions, but there was a mixed batched for them as their other mentions were ones I deemed negative. Fang gave the Silverado commercial about the apocalypse an A, while the Chevy Sonic commercial received a modest B-. Meanwhile, Cindy Boren, 13^th on our list, named Chevy a 1^st quarter winner for their apocalypse commercial. Unrelated to commercials, #1 on our list, Bruce Raffel gave them a positive mention in relation to one of Chevy’s other marketing initiatives related to the Super Bowl, giving Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning a Chevy Corvette, a car which Raffel called “sweet.”

On the flip side, however, Fang gave their commercial for the Camaro, which featured a high school graduate mistakenly thinking his parents bought him a Camaro for graduation, an F. Meanwhile, #23 Andy Hutchins mocked Chevy’s apocalypse commercial by tweeting “‘Drive a Chevy or die!’ – Chevy.” Fortunately for Chevy, the comment was by an influencer on the list because of high relevance and lower reach and resonance, so he only received 11 retweets. All in all, I’d say Chevy should be pleased with the mentions surrounding their brand, especially since they received 7 total. People were definitely talking about their 3 commercials.

Between all the super bowl commercial among these top three, the sentiment was pretty evenly split as the below graph indicates. Note: red = positive, black = negative, gray = neutral.

Sentiment analysis breakdown visual in Analytics Suite

As you can see, discovering influencers is only half the battle. The other half is in the monitoring of your influencers. Being able to track how many times the most influential people in a certain topic are mentioning your brand or keyword and exactly what they’re saying with the ability to assign the sentiment surrounding it can be incredibly valuable for brands, regardless of whether or not they are running one 3.5 million dollar Super Bowl commercial, or an ongoing social media campaign.

Just to get everyone up-to-speed, the New England Patriots and the New York Giants are squaring off in Super Bowl 46. The reason this game is such a big deal is because for the Patriots, this is Super Bowl #5 in 10 full seasons of Tom Brady at starting quarterback and their first since losing Super Bowl XLII (42) to the Giants in 2008. After how exciting the first Super Bowl matchup between these two teams was, this game is a pretty big deal. It is widely expected to surpass last year’s Super Bowl, which totaled 111 million viewers, as the most watched TV program of all time.

We created the Super Bowl XLVI A-list to serve as a resource for anyone interested in following and perhaps capitalizing on one of the biggest sports games of the year.You should consider using these influencers in an out-of-the-box approach to reaching the hundreds of millions of viewers and listeners, without paying the $3.5 million price tag.

It’s important to note that the influencers on our list may not be those you’d normally expect like ESPN.com or Twitter handles like @sportscenter. We are all about people – you put in keywords, you get back people. So, our results found the people most relevant to the game based on our keyword set, which you can view on the A-list.

Being a huge fan of football, I found a few things interesting in the results our database brought back. The most interesting is how these weren’t necessarily the big names, people that could be found easily, but they were still all very relevant to the topic. Some of them, including #2 Paul Banks, were people I have worked with in running The Football Fan Spot.

We all know that commercials are always the talk of the game, aside from the game itself. It appears that sponsors you’ll be seeing this year range from VW to GM to Doritos and Coca-Cola. How they’re integrating their brand messaging into the game is the interesting part. Lisa Arthur, a contributor to Forbes, wrote a great article on this, talking about how the city of Indianapolis is using social media to provide the best experience for visitors in town for the Super Bowl, and in turn, how brands are using that social media activity to their advantage.

I hope you check out the Super Bowl A-list we created and find some use for it in your business. If you come up with any good ideas or stories, please share!