Love this – smart use of YouTube, but then made even smarter using a link from your phone to the screen. Fiendishly difficult, but superbly addictive. Great work on Cheetos from Goodby Silverstein.

Ad Age are running a vote on which of the below is the most moving viral of the year – so go vote here. Winner gets announced at the Ad Age Digital Conference, April 16th/17th. It’s a tough choice, btw…

Below is copied from Ad Age:

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“Camping” for Google

Agency: Mullen

“Security Cameras” for Coca-Cola

Agency: Y&R Argentina

“Farmer” for Ram

Agency: The Richards Group Dallas

“Clydesdales” for Budweiser

Agency: Anomaly

“Whole Again” for Jeep, USO

Agency: GlobalHue Detroit

“Find Your Understanding” for Expedia

Agency: 180LA

I’ll say it again – vote here!

Fantastic live data site for UFC. There’s lots of examples of people visualising the flow of data around brands at the moment – including a number of more static images created after the fact, like this beauty for Facebook:

There’s a lot I liked this year. And some controversial ones too: I’m not sure that Audi’s prom guy was brave or just out of order. GoDaddy managed to stir controversy as usual. And VW was accused of racism, although I don’t subscribe to it personally – great ad that makes you smile. I think I liked the teaser for Taco Bell even more than the ad, but that was a corker too. Samsung entertained. In fact, all the car ads were pretty good. JEEP took a very different position, but a lovely way to combine personal ownership with Jeep’s army contract. I liked Oreo’s Whisper Fight – particularly the cop whispering into the bullhorn! And, for the first time, I kinda liked one of the Doritos competition ads: Goat 4 Sale. But 3 have just stayed with me. They’re superb:

I like these two equally: RAM “Farmers” and Budweiser “Brotherhood”. They’re just fantastic craft skills, writing and emotive ideas.

However, my absolute favourite is the Coca Cola spot: “Security Cameras“. I didn’t expect it and, I’ll confess, I hadn’t seen it before. I know they “recreated” some of the footage, but it’s still superb – makes up for The Chase, which was just expensively dull and hard to see why people would vote (if they did)!

(Image source: Tom Fishburne – The Marketoonist)

YouTube views of Super Bowl Ads

Now we’re almost a week from Super Bowl Sunday, I thought I’d see what’s getting viewed on YouTube – and compare that to the USA Today Poll… then just dig into the figures a bit.

And the results are interesting – yet again, what people claim to like (i.e., what they vote for) is very different from real world behaviour (i.e., what they watch). Geeky moment, but this is why I love digging into the data behind things – to look at real behaviour, since I’m growing certain that all claimed responses are entirely wishful/fictional! Note: This doesn’t mean that research can’t tell you valuable things, nor that it isn’t invaluable for host of answers that aren’t available through behavioural data, but you can’t help question to what extent people responding to questions gives you reality.

Anyway, back to the ads: straight away, that ad we all shy away from with the awkward kiss between Bar Rafaeli and an unknown geek is back up in popularity again, coming in third place. But Toyota’s RAV4 ad – Genie, starring Kaley Cucco, comes in pole position. It’s good to see Budweiser’s “Brotherhood” with the horse and breeder/trainer coming in a respectable 4th place, but Tide’s Miracle Stain ad has vanished from the top ten (if you look at the full list below, you’ll see it’s just made the top 20. Likewise, the NFL ad, which is hard to even find on YouTube.

Next up, let’s look at the full list, but also how well these brands are “owning” (terrible word, but it seems fitting!) the views… In other words, how much of their viewing figures are through the official video – the one where they control the description and are able to put links to brand sites, social pages, etc… Toyota, Samsung, VW, Audi, Coke, JEEP all score over 95% – so they’ve managed to keep the conversation and the views in an environment they control. I’m not claiming they’ll all be on YouTube rather than in embedded players, etc. but this should mean that they’re not having ads for other brands playing before the video starts. Which is a real problem once your views are on someone else’s channel. I just watched a Kia ad with a 2 minute BMW UK ad as a pre-roll – which proves the point.

Incidentally, Coca Cola’s Security Cameras spot is so low because all the views are from the original version (which was aired in June 2012, and originally made for Coca Cola Latin America by Landia)

Finally, let’s look at an aggregated score – what happens when you include the views of Trailers (and, for Sodastream, that banned ad which is getting a lot more views than the one aired)… Toyota still does well, but we see VW climb into the Top 3, Mercedes leapfrog to 4th place (driven more by Kate Upton than “Soul” and Samsung hits a phenomenal 22m+ views.

Note to reader: These figures were collated from searching YouTube on key words around these ads. They’re not going to be 100% correct AND, once you read this post, they’re probably out of date – hopefully, they’re still ranking the same, though!

USA Today has now released the results of the AdMeter survey. Which shows us the most voted-for ads from the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, TechCrunch have released the ads which TiVo users watched most – at least the ones they were least likely to fast forward and which had the biggest “bump” in viewing relative to the surrounding 15 minutes of programming. So, if we’re to believe the methodology is sound, that’s what people actually responded to “live”. I also had a peek yesterday at what was getting the best votes on Ad Age: Let’s pretend this is a fair summary of the industry view, for the sake of argument. Finally, there’s the journalistic opinion – that comes from Stuart Elliott at The New York Times. And here’s the summary of all that different voting.

A few things hit me, not least how different people’s real behaviour is from how they’d like to see themselves:

1. The critics, industry and USA Today are all behind the Budweiser “Brotherhood” ad – dead right, too – it’s excellent. Stand out winner for me. BUT… It doesn’t even make an appearance on the “what people took notice of on the day”. Thank goodness for the post views on YouTube, where it’s already racked up 9.3 million views.

2. Two of my favourites, Taco Bell “Viva Young” and VW “Get in. Get happy”, don’t make any mark on the USA Today poll. Both scored with actual viewers, though – with Taco Bell coming in number 1.

3. The universally derided spots from Pepsi & GoDaddy (honestly, read the press) might not have been liked, but they got watched.

4. How come Doritos “Fashionista Dad” beat “Goat for Sale”? I know the answer really – same reason that Hyundai “Epic Playdate” was beaten by “Team”: people love a story.

Notes on the table: Stuart Elliott ranked his alphabetically, so they’re not in a comparative order. I’ve “fudged” the results for Ad Age, since it’s more which ads had a Four Star or a Three point Five star rating that I used to pick them.

If you haven’t indulged yet, or just got locked out of the Ad Age collection, you can still see all the ads, here at USA Today, or here at Super Bowl-ads.com.

Fantastic idea from Lynx – “Leave a man. Come back a hero” – as launched with the “Apollo Fireman” TV ad.

But, looking at the leader board, I can’t help but worry that the winner could be Christopher Poole, who’s space ambition is: “I want to be far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like!”

I can’t imagine Buzz Aldrin, who did the intro video, being happy with that one!

Coke’s in the running for the Superbowl (excuse the weak pun) with this chase for the Coke ad, where users get to decide the ending.

I’ll confess, I was sceptical that it would be getting big views or big engagement, since it’s hard to really know what you’ll get from it.

Views aren’t bad, at 426k (early on 28th Jan), but engagement seems weaker… A quick scan using Visible Intelligence (the weapons-grade Buzz Monitoring tool) shows only a few hundred engagements around the hashtags they’ve set up:

The real question is “what comes next?” – is the ad just going to finish same as the start or is there more of a twist and interest built in? What does the engagement pay back?

I’m hoping they do something cool with this. It’s Coke.

Be interesting to see how VW turns this into Superbowl action… but lovely teaser.

The Obama comment is a fake, although I love the thought that he’d comment – and that, like 99% of people who commented, he’d be an ardent fan of Boogie, who definitely prompts the comments!

Possibly my favourite time of year – at least, it might be if the UK wasn’t so damn cold in Jan/Feb! And here’s an early hint of stuff to come… for Taco Bell – Deutsch’s latest: