New York: Super Bowl 50 fell short of setting a new US television-watching record as its Sunday night broadcast of the 50th Super Bowl averaged 111.9 million viewers.
The Denver Broncos’ win over the Carolina Panthers ranked third in US TV programme history, according to Nielsen, behind last year’s NBC broadcast of the game, which drew 114.4 million viewers and the 2014 Super Bowl on Fox, with an audience of 112.2 million.
Watching peaked at 115.5 million during the half-time show, which starred Beyoncé, Bruno Mars and Coldplay.
Online streams of the game through CBS and the National Football League averaged 1.4 million viewers per minute. The broadcast was available for the first time this year on internet connected TV boxes including Apple TV and Roku, expanding its audience. Last year, NBC averaged 800,000 online viewers a minute, but that total did not include any NFL streams.
With CBS charging a record $5 million (Dh18.36 million) for 30 seconds of commercial time, most advertisers stuck to tried and tested tactics: humour, animals and plenty of celebrity appearances.
Many of the 64 brands who created 98 advertisements that ran during the game released their spots early online to gain additional attention. Super Bowl ads generated more than 513 million online video views, according to iSpot.tv, which tracks advertising. Sunday alone saw 62.4 million views, with 34 million on Facebook, thanks to the social network’s push to capture video share from Google’s YouTube.
Facebook said it counted 200 million posts, likes and comments related to the game from 60 million users, while YouTube said people watched nearly 300,000 hours of advertisements on its site during Sunday’s broadcast. Twitter users sent 16.9 million tweets about the game on Sunday, including 4.6 million tweets about ads.
One of the biggest celebrity endorsements of a product on Sunday came without a $5 million price tag. Peyton Manning, the quarterback for the winning Broncos, said twice on TV after the game that he would “drink a lot of Budweiser tonight”.
A spokeswoman for beer maker AB InBev said Manning was not a paid endorser of the brand, but that the company was “surprised and delighted that he did”. In fact, NFL rules prohibit athletes from endorsing any alcoholic beverage.
Frito-Lay’s Doritos scored the most mentions on Twitter as it wrapped up the 10th and final instalment of its “Crash the Super Bowl” contest that invited fans to submit their own advertisements, according to Brandwatch, a social media analytics group.
One of the snackmaker’s two ads — this one featuring a pregnant woman whose baby had an appetite for crisps — was the most-shared online ad with nearly 900,000 shares on social media, according to a tally from Unruly, a video ad technology company.
Several of the most-viewed ads on game day, according to iSpot.tv, featured celebrities: actors Kevin Hart and Ryan Reynolds for Hyundai, the rapper Drake for T-Mobile, and Helen Mirren in a Budweiser message condemning drink-driving. The top spot from Pepsi’s Mountain Dew Kickstart beverage bridged the comedy and animal categories with a strange creature dubbed “puppymonkeybaby”.
Also popular in both Unruly’s and iSpot.tv’s surveys were Heinz’s commercial filled with dachshunds dressed as hot dogs, a Nintendo ad celebrating the 20th anniversary of Pokemon, and Bud Light’s contribution from comedians Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer.
However, Unruly found that overall online sharing dropped 36 per cent to 2.9 million from 4.5 million last year. Sarah Wood, Unruly co-chief executive, noted a contrast between the high emotions of 2015 ads, which included a much-derided spot from insurer Nationwide about a dead child, and 2016’s more sanguine fare.
“Last year was an emotional rollercoaster; this year was Super Bowl lite,” she said.
— Financial Times
