For Super Bowl advertising success, it seems that advertisers need to produce a spot which is either outrageous or outstanding in order to produce the necessary amount of buzz to justify ad spend. Groupon’s ads produced a fair amount of outrage and the resulting online impact was that among Super Bowl advertisers, Groupon.com received the second greatest bump in share of visits on Monday. Volkswagen’s ad called “The Force” has been widely lauded as one of 2011′s top commercials, but with different results.
There is no dialogue in “The Force” and in the 60 second spot we see the VW logo, mostly subtly on the hood of the car, for about 15 seconds – not a great deal of time when the viewer is focused on the ad’s storyline. Indeed, in post Super Bowl discussions people in our office referred to it as “that Darth Vader ad”, rather than “the Volkswagen ad” and the online population perceived the ad in the same way.
On the Monday after the Super Bowl, web-users searched for “Darth Vader” and “Max Page and Darth Vader Super Bowl commercial”, rather than “Volkswagen Super Bowl commercial”. Indeed, none of the top 20 variations of “Darth Vader”, “Volkswagen” and “VW” associated the Volkswagen brand with the Darth Vader ad.

However, the good news is that this changed by Wednesday, possibly after viewing the ad online or reading about the ad, because web-users began to search for “VW Darth Vader kid” and “Volkswagen Darth Vader commercial”. In this case, the brand awareness and association increased somewhat with latency.

Thanks to Margot Bonner, an Analyst with our Custom Data & Analytics team for the analysis (and tracking all of the Super Bowl ads this year).