Super Bowl LVI:

The brands that won the big game

In our latest report, we looked at the brands that made the biggest splash with their ads, as well as coverage of the game more broadly. We’ve got some of the highlights here, but you can download the full report with even more insights below.

Nostalgia, Crypto
& Electric cars

Super Bowl Sunday is one of the most-watched events in the world — a spectacle that brings friends, families, teammates, and brands together to take part in a US cultural phenomenon.

The game itself brings excitement, but for many, that’s not the main reason for tuning in, as each year brands battle it out to produce 
the best Super Bowl ad, and the halftime show adds more legendary musicians to its already impressive roster.

This year, we saw a few themes emerge within the types of ads that ran. Of course, the usual big players in the food & beverage game played their hand, but cryptocurrency made a splash among commercials, earning the nickname of the “crypto bowl” from some publishers.

Cars are also often among the favorites, but this year the majority of auto brands featured electric vehicles, which have received a notable amount of engagement.

Brands are used to competing against each other for a chance to capture interest during the game, but we can’t forget about this year’s halftime performers who, compared to past Super Bowls, completely dominated 
in terms of public engagement.

The performances from hip-hop greats like Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Mary J Blige leaned heavily into nostalgia and displayed a love for 
LA history that was later praised by celebrities and millennial audiences.

Although the Super Bowl is a uniquely American event, the hype 
around the game goes far beyond a solely American audience, with 
media coverage from international publishers and fans across the world sharing posts on social platforms.

For that reason, we have explored the media and public interest leading up to the Super Bowl and after the game concluded. We will also dive into the top articles about the halftime show, and highlight the brands whose ads have generated large amounts of engagement, such as Chevrolet’s Silverado, Coinbase’s QR code, and Budweiser’s famous Clydesdales.

Let’s begin with coverage of Super Bowl LVI more broadly.

1.55m

engagements with articles about Super Bowl ads 

142k

articles written about the Super Bowl in February

Super bowl Ads

Super Bowl ads don’t just go viral on the day of the game, and there was a build-up to the ads across the two weeks before, in which there were broad discussions about both individual ads and the concept of them more broadly.

In the two weeks leading up to and including the Super Bowl, there were almost 16k articles about ads, with more than a million engagements. Obviously these were mostly on the day itself and the following day, but there were significant conversations and early announcements of ads that caused peaks in public interest before that as well.

When it came to ads, there were three main themes that emerged. Two of those were for specific kinds of product, with cryptocurrency brokers and electric vehicles dominating the conversation.

The third theme was the tone of the ads themselves, which often tried to strike a nostalgic tone. The Silverado ad channeled The Sopranos, while Big Lebowski vibes were also served up, and iconic characters such as Dr. Evil and Jim Carrey’s Cable Guy were revived for a fresh 2022 perspective.

Let’s look at some of the top stories.

Public interest in the Super Bowl ads


Media interest in the Super Bowl ads

AD: Silverado

The Silverado ad was not one that was pre-announced, and that surprise factor helped it to have the highest engagement to earned media coverage about it during the 24-hour period before and after the game.

The ad fit two of the three unofficial themes of the evening by generating nostalgia around an electric vehicle, and was written about almost 1,000 times with more than 162k engagements to those articles — the most during the time period covered.

AD: Rings of Power

Amazon Prime Video’s ‘The Rings of Power’ — an adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s work — has been in the works for years, but we finally got our first glimpse of it during the big game.

This was the second most covered ad on the day of the event, with more than 600 articles and 81k engagements. The coverage was mostly neutral, with the headlines not offering any opinion on the quality of the trailer but rather simply describing its release.

coverage of the super bowl 

Engagement to the Super Bowl really began to ramp up at the beginning of February, when we finally knew that it would be the Cincinnati Bengals playing the Los Angeles Rams at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.

Looking at the level of coverage in that time, there were more than 140k articles written about the sporting event — an average of more than 
10,000 per day.

It was on the public interest side, though, that the numbers were truly impressive. Coverage of the big game in the two weeks leading up to the event generated more than 19 million engagements or almost 1.5 million 
per day.

Unsurprisingly, both of these spiked in the week before the game, and the day of the game itself, there were 30,000 articles written about the Super Bowl, and engagements to those articles and those written the next day topped 10 million.

Public interest in the Super Bowl

Media interest in the Super Bowl

The half time show 

On the day of the game the halftime show was the dominant narrative, and we used NewsWhip’s Timeline feature to examine exactly when this engagement happened.

From the graph, it is obvious that while articles were being written about 
the halftime show even before the game, nobody was really interested in them, with the hundreds of articles written getting almost no engagement.

However, as soon as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige, 50 Cent, Eminem, and Kendrick Lamar had taken the stage, there was an explosion in interest from both the media and the public, with thousands of articles published and hundreds of thousands of engagements per hour, which continued well into the night as people around the world reacted to the coverage.

In total, during the 24-hour period from just before the game up until the same time the next day, there were more than 8,000 articles written and almost 6 million engagements to those articles about the halftime show alone.

Public interest in the halftime show


Media interest in the halftime show

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