Twitter Rewards Brands That Devoted Some Super Bowl Marketing Effort to the Platform

Twitter's first Brand Bowl, a friendly competition among advertisers during the Super Bowl, has its first champions. According to Twitter, 90 percent of all Super Bowl advertisers competed in the inaugural competition. Many of the brands taking home prizes in individual categories leaned on the strength of their television commercials, but the top awards went to companies orchestrating strong Twitter-specific campaigns. Three Pepsi brands nabbed prizes, with Pepsi's halftime show and merchandise giveaways along with the Doritos vs. Mountain Dew rap battle generating lots of online chatter. Doritos and Mountain Dew's brands kept up their aggressive Ice vs. Fire patter on Twitter, with Mountain Dew claiming the #ICECOLD and #MTNDEWICE hashtags and Doritos representing #SPITFIRE and #DoritosBlaze. Doritos and Mountain Dew generated a peak of 11,000 tweets per minute, enough to win the Blitz award. The main Pepsi brand periodically weighed in on one side or the other but mostly focused on a series of giveaways, offering gear from halftime performer Justin Timberlake and the AFC champion Patriots to fans who retweeted specific tweets. This was enough for Pepsi to steal the MVP (most tweeted about) award from Tide, which came in second place. [kickout id="1"] The Interception award for brands without a TV spot went to Ally Bank, which likewise mounted a giveaway, via an AR game. At each commercial break, fans could grab falling virtual money or golden balls to earn points toward real money. [kickout id="2"] Other brands without a TV ad that used Twitter to get their message out included Skittles, which presented a series of imaginary Super Bowl ads starring David Schwimmer, and Uber, which saw some success with their "designated rider" campaign starring Jillian Bell. The Jurassic World trailer rounded out the top awards, winning the Quarterback award for most retweeted single tweet with over 16,000 retweets as of Monday morning. Tide, Bud Light, Ram Trucks, Avocados From Mexico, Westworld, E-Trade, Amazon, T-Mobile and Australian Tourism all won awards for their respective product categories, backing up strong TV ads with solid Twitter reinforcement. "We saw a huge amount of excitement from brands participating in the first-ever #BrandBowl52 competition—and the campaigns that came to life on Twitter surely did not disappoint," said Ryan Oliver, Head of Brand Strategy US/CAN at Twitter. "From Pepsi's throwback ad to Doritos and Mountain Dew's rap battle to the #TideAd stealing the show, we saw brands take different approaches and nailing the #BrandBowl conversation. We look forward to seeing how we can bring this competition to life for different events and moments in the future."