The Tuesday Evening Quarterback

Super Bowl 49's 2nd Screen Winners and Losers

2nd Screen played a major role in this year’s Super Bowl, from brands making excellent use of Twitter to the 1.3 million viewers who watched NBC’s free live stream of the game. Today we’ll play Tuesday Evening Quarterback and take a look at some of the winners and losers.

Battle of The Aggregation Pages

Both Facebook and Twitter set up special landing pages for the Super Bowl and there was a lot of buzz around them. Both turned out to be major duds.

To begin with, they were all but impossible to find. I wound up having to resort to Google to find them— there wasn’t an obvious link off either platform’s home page. What’s more, neither page was particularly useful: Twitter had a rapidly moving feed of all tweets with #SB49 on them that would have been next to impossible to follow even if I had cared what a bunch of random strangers were saying. I was far happier to stick with my own feed.

Facebook tried for some more functionality, with play-by-play and related content, but given that NBC was livestreaming the game for free, was anyone really relying on Facebook for a play-by-play?

Twitter was the overall winner here as the platform is best suited for live events where comments need to be viewed in real time. Facebook’s News Feed algorithm all but ensures some people won’t see your post about Julian Edelman until Thursday. (Especially if you forget to tag it.)

Brands too seemed to make more and better use of Twitter than any other platform: here again, the immediacy of the Twitter feed trumped all other considerations.

Live Streaming

For tablet and desktop viewers, NBC was offering a livestream from NBC Sports Live Extra. The number of streaming viewers was way up this year – according to TV By The Numbers, “The 800,000 average viewers per minute was up 52% when compared to FOX’s stream of Super Bowl XLVIII last year, which was believed to be the previous record and averaged 528,000 viewers per minute. Concurrent users peaked at 1.3 million at the moment when Patriots CB Malcolm Butler made his game-winning interception in the final seconds, and is up 18% vs. FOX last year (1.1 million).”

Those impressive numbers are offset somewhat by the fact that the stream was anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes behind the live TV broadcast which made for an awkward Twitter experience as the touchdowns everyone was cheering about hadn’t yet happened in your world. (In my own test, the stream was 2 plays or about 3 minutes behind the feed from my FIOS-powered TV. Friends reported delays of up to 5 minutes.)

The app also crashed fairly consistently on my iPad 3 – about every 10 to 15 minutes the picture would freeze while the audio kept right on playing. A quick restart of the app got us back on track.

And, as evidenced below, sometimes the feed was clear and crisp and other times it looked quite pixelated.

A final note on those streaming numbers: the total may be somewhat skewed by the fact that NBC was allowing people to watch for free, with no authentication necessary. That alone may have drawn in a sizable number of viewers who otherwise would not have bothered to watch.

Advertising on the iPad app was interesting. The feed had some of the same commercials that ran on the live TV feed, but not at the same time and some of them ran twice, possibly three or four times. There was also the Black Screen Of Death, with the message “Coverage Will Resume Shortly” as seen below, when there were no spots to run.

One interesting note was that NBC had banner ads running below the feed. When a commercial was on, the banner was for the same brand, which allowed for a level of interactivity that’s not available from standard TV broadcasts.

BRANDS: A Tale Of Three Companies

The Winner
McDonald’s was the clear winner among brands last night. In a very clever move, they had their brand Twitter feed comment on everyone else’s commercials… and then use those tweets to launch a game-long contest that had McDonald’s giving away very generous prizes like a Mercedes or Lexus. Fans only had to retweet McDonald’s “enter our contest and you could win…” tweets to enter and the result was a flood of tweets bearing the familiar red and yellow logo in everyone’s stream.

According to Twitter, McDonald’s garnered 634,310 mentions during the game, more than any other brand.

The Also-Ran
Doritos used their Twitter feed to promote video spoofs they’d done of other brand’s commercials. All well and good, except that as we mentioned last week, no one is going to take a full minute out of the game to watch what you’ve done, no matter how clever your video is. So while they get an A for effort, the videos were wasted.

A quick review this morning shows that they made a very limited follow up attempt (2 tweets) on Monday. Too bad, because the videos were actually fairly clever.

The Loser
Nationwide Insurance ran a moderately clever spot with Mindy Kaling and Matt Damon at the beginning of the game. They then followed that up with a spot highlighting the dangers of home accidents that was told from the POV of a dead child. Dead children and fun events like the Super Bowl don’t really mix and viewers reacted harshly, creating an instant meme out of the dead boy and plastering it all over Twitter and other social platforms. The reaction was so harsh that Nationwide issued a press release immediately after the game, claiming they were only trying to start a conversation, not sell insurance. #FAIL.

So there you have it. The two big winners were Twitter and McDonald’s and the ability of an old school brand like McDonald’s to score on the 2nd Screen front bodes well for continued adoption. McDonalds is now able to go back and get the data from all those people who retweeted to enter, cross reference it with other databases to learn more about them and thus have a pretty good idea of who their brands biggest fans are.

They’ll also be able to see which prizes garnered the most retweets, what times people were most likely to retweet and a host of other valuable information.

Because as we keep saying, with 2nd Screen, it’s all about the data.

This originally ran on the 2nd Screen Society blog