Super Bowl or Super Ads?

So, Super Bowl XLII is over with the New York Giants overcoming the Patriots at the last to clinch a 17-14 victory and their 3rd Super Bowl ever . OK, I pretty much copied the above from a BBC article and I actually know bugger all about American football and have little inclination to learn either. However, I do have a geeky side that is a *tiny* bit obsessed by stats.

I had a bit of a snoop around some search activity in the States over the last weekend (with the Super Bowl in mind) and, unsurprisingly, found not only the official Super Bowl site but links to the sponsors and a site solely dedicated to the 'commercials' (complete with links to accompanying microsites). More surprising were the other search volumes results picked up by Google analytics.

On the run up to the weekend there was an increase in searches concerning "kick off time" whilst on the day itself (3rd Feb) there was a lot of activity around the search terms "giants win superbowl". In fact, the latter was the 11th 'highest search riser' of the day - no shocks there.

But guess who made the top ten? The sponsors. At number 4 and 5 was "goddady.com" and "go daddy.com" (a web hosting company), at 6 was "Audi R8 price" who just pipped "life water" at number 7. All featured adverts during the Super Bowl commercial breaks.

Not only did the sponsors dominate the search volumes on the day of one of the biggest sporting occasions in the US, a quick look at searching volumes so far today reveals that "super bowl commercials" appears no less then 4 times in various formats in the top 10!

As a sports fan this broaches quite a few philosophical questions, but if you put these aside for a rainy day you're left with a great example of a tradionally hard to measure media having a direct, and measurable, effect. Awesome.

As for the most popular search term on the day of the mighty Super Bowl, I have no idea who "Tom Petty" is nor "How old" he is. But give "How old is Tommy Petty" a go on the Google machine - seems to be the done thing stateside.