Super Bowl Most Watched Show In US History; 280,000 Aussies Tune In

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady holds up Vince Lombardi Trophy after the Patriots defeated the Seattle Seahawks 28-24 in NFL Super Bowl XLIX football game Sunday, Feb. 1, 2015, in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)
John Bastick
By John Bastick



Yesterday’s Super Bowl match between the Seattle Seahawks and eleventh-hour victors the New England Patriots was watched by a record 114.4 million Americans according to broadcaster NBC.

Interestingly, 118.5 million turned into watch Katy Perry’s half-time performance. The result was 2.2 million up on 2014’s game, the previous holder of ‘the most watched’ title.

OzTam’s preliminary ratings for yesterday’s Australian audience was 280,000 metro viewers, an increase of 70,000 on last year.

When it came to the ads, Budweiser’s Clydesdale/puppy combo appeared to be the audience’s favourite, scoring most online hits and most of the online activity about the Super Bowl spots.

Arguably the most talked about ad from yesterday was ‘Make Safe Happen’ – a child protection commercial that featured the narration of a dead child. As daring as it was, social media lit up, primarily for having such a ‘down’ message during the nations’ biggest sporting event. The ad was mentioned 238,000 times on social media and 64 per cent of the comments were negative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKUy-tfrIHY

One firm who provide extensive research of Super Bowl’s advertising effectiveness is Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It’s vice president of marketing insights, Jeff Rohrs, says the most noticeable thing from yesterday’s gridiron ad orgy was a noticeable lack of ‘call to action’ by brands. Rohrs’ other findings included:

  • Research showed that 61 per cent of the audience planned to watch the Super Bowl on their smartphones, yet 51 per cent of advertisers ran ads with no ‘call to action’.
  • In 2015, more Super Bowl ads contained phone numbers than calls to download mobile apps (8:5) or engage with SMS (8:0).
  • The average time a hashtag was on screen during a Super Bowl commercial was less than one second.
  • If you take out the hashtags there wasn’t a single, true social call to action in any of ads.
  • Pre-released ads on YouTube had better ‘call to actions’. This year the vast majority (around 80 per cent) released their ads for online viewing on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere.



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