Facebook Videos Pull Upset Over Favored YouTube at Super Bowl 2015
Super Bowl ads run through the Facebook player generated more shares than those launched on YouTube this year.
Super Bowl ads run through the Facebook player generated more shares than those launched on YouTube this year.
While a lot of Monday morning quarterbacks were replaying Seattle’s slant pass with just 26 seconds left in Super Bowl 2015, a team from Unruly, a video ad-tech company, was reviewing the video ads to see whether YouTube or Facebook videos had won the “Big Game.” What they found will shake up conventional wisdom more than New England’s use of the ineligible receiver.
According to Unruly’s data:
YouTube’s upset by Facebook video shakes up conventional wisdom far more than the fact that a Budweiser ad has won the Super Bowl for the third time in a row. The beer brand’s “Lost Dog” commercial attracted 2,168,530 shares across Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, according to data supplied by Unruly, making it the fourth most shared Super Bowl ad of all time.
It’s the third successive year the Anheuser-Busch InBev brand has had the most shared ad of the Super Bowl. In 2014, “Puppy Love” won the Big Game after generating 1.31 million shares the day after Super Bowl Sunday. “Brotherhood” also won at a canter the previous year, attracting 1.5 million shares. The ads currently have 2.91 million and 2.04 million shares respectively.
Released online on January 28, “Lost Dog” generated most of its shares (1.9 million) before Super Bowl Sunday and is on course to surpass their “9/11 Commercial” from Super Bowl 2002 (3.48 million shares) as the most shared Budweiser ad of all time.
The bigger news – hidden in plain sight – is the fact that at week after the Big Game Facebook videos hold four of the top five spots in Unruly’s chart of Super Bowl 2015 Aired Ads.
Over the weekend, the Facebook video versions of Fast and Furious 7’s “This takes crazy to a whole new level,” Budweiser’s “Watch our 2015 Super Bowl commercial,” Clash of Titan’s “Revenge,” and Ted 2’s “Told you I saw Tom Brady’s balls” ranked one, two, three, and four respectively.
You had to click on “Always #LikeAGirl,” which ranked number five, before you saw a video ad that had been published on YouTube.
That is the classic definition of an upset. This shakes up video advertising for the Big Game as much as the victory by the AFL’s New York Jets over the favored NFL’s Baltimore Colts did in Super Bowl III. That was way back in January 1969 – before either New England’s quarterback Tom Brady or Seattle’s quarterback Russell Wilson was born.