This year's Super Bowl showed a new group of advertisers—mobile games—aiming to take over the world's biggest marketing event. And while it's easy to chalk up these companies' TV investments to big marketing budgets, (Machine Zone's Game of War: Fire Age reportedly launched a campaign with Kate Upton in November backed by $40 million in media) it's part of a more interesting trend that's shaking up technology and digital brands.

Three mobile games—Game of War, Heroes Charge and Clash of Clans—ran in-game ads during this weekend's Super Bowl broadcast, suggesting that brands are ditching their gamer reputations to become mainstream forms of entertainment.

But without the established brand awareness that Big Game staples have in categories like automotive and food and beverage (think Budweiser and Ford), it's unclear if viewers will actually remember this year's new crop of mobile game advertisers now that the game is over.

"It reminds me of GoDaddy—do people know what domains are [and] do people know what hosting is? I would expect no," said Tuong Huy Nguyen, a principal research analyst at Gartner. "But, on the flip side, it says something about where gaming has gotten to today. It truly has become much more mass market, it's not just what 18- to 32-year-old males do."

To Nguyen's point, GoDaddy ran its 11th Super Bowl ad this year but only in recent years has started to downplay its notoriously scandalous ads to focus on the company's products. That strategy ended up blowing up in the company's face when it pulled this year's ad at the last minute after complaints about the spot's references to puppy mills. 

TV-Heavy Budgets
Out of the three mobile gaming brands promoted on TV Sunday night, uCool's ad for Heroes Charge is perhaps the smallest name. The brand ran a 15-second promo during the fourth quarter of the game that showed a scene from the game. A call to action at the end of the ad promoted viewers to download the app.

After launching in October last year, Heroes Charge began running TV ads. Based on those results, the brand is now allocating 75 percent of its marketing spend to TV while 25 percent goes to digital. While the numbers bode well for traditional advertising, a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost a reported $4.5 million this year.

"Through television, we're seeing a ten-fold growth in our player volume, and with more than one million apps for players to choose to engage with, it's really increased the cost to market in what is now an overly saturated area," said Benjamin Gifford, vp of user experience for Heroes Charge studio uCool.

Meanwhile, Game of War ran a 30-second ad that showed Upton in reenacted scenes from the game. The goal, of course, is that Upton's image will resonate with a larger group of Americans that aren't necessarily gamers. "It ties into that mass-market appeal," Gartner's Nguyen said. "[But] I'm going to say I'm skeptical of how successful that would be."

Mobile gaming company Supercell and agency Barton F. Graf 9000 also leaned on a celebrity—Liam Neeson—to promote its Clash of Clans game.

By the Numbers
Data from iSpot.tv tracked how many times each of the commercials were viewed on Facebook and YouTube and shared on social media. Heroes Charge's 15-second ad generated an estimated 46,715 earned Facebook and YouTube views and 702 social actions. Game of War's spot drove 915,799 views and 14,908 shares. And Clash of Clans raked in 3,078 views and 71,116 social actions.

Despite the low number of views, the data shows that Clash of Clans' ad was one of the buzziest brands on Twitter Sunday night.

Findings from social firm NetBase back up iSpot.tv's data. NetBase measured social media sentiment, emotions and mentions to compile a list of the top 10 buzzy Super Bowl brands. Clash of Clans took the No. 9 spot and is the only tech name on the chart. Longtime Super Bowl favorites McDonald's, Budweiser and Coca-Cola also ranked on the list.

Beyond the data, Derek Rucker, professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, pointed out that Clash of Clans' promo may have struck a chord with Super Bowl viewers because the game itself fit into a bigger plot line.

"It wasn't just the use of Liam Neeson—it was the story they were telling," Rucker said. During the 30-second spot, Neeson is seen losing a game while waiting for his order at a coffee shop, which then triggers him to seek revenge against his opponent. "You will regret the day you crossed AngryNeeson52," he says at the end of the commercial.

Compared to the other two Super Bowl mobile game ads, what makes the Clash of Clans promo stand out is how it mixes scenes from the game with the actor's monologue.

"If you're going to advertise for this massive audience, one thing to think of is how do you maximize your investment," Rucker explained. "Part of that is that you should show up with creative worthy of the Super Bowl."
 

A couple hours after New England beat Seattle on Sunday night, I was beat. But my exhaustion had nothing to do with the hour, the game or the fact that Bill Belichick won his fourth championship for a team not named the Cleveland Browns. I'm officially tired of watching Super Bowl advertisers waste their money in pursuit of branding over consumer action and engagement.

You see, this is the third year that I've watched, cataloged and analyzed the calls-to action (CTAs) in each and every Super Bowl ad, and since 2013, consumers have only become more mobile and increasingly social. And yet, Big Game commercials have become less mobile and less social. Before I explain, let me break down my process for you.

Jeff Rohrs

This year, 137 commercials aired in my Cleveland locale from 6 p.m. ET until the end of the commercial break after the final whistle. Of those commercials, 24 were NBC promos, six were NFL spots and three were ads from my local affiliate.

Interestingly, only one of the NBC promos contained a call-to-action for any of the shows promoted. It was #HeroesReborn, which appeared on screen for one second during the promo for the "Heroes" series reboot. Of the NFL ads, only the Play60 spot contained a CTA (the URL for NFLRush.com). Amazingly, it was my local NBC affliate, WKYC, that had the boldest CTAs—both a hashtag #WKYCTheMoney and a push to download their mobile app.

Subtracting the NBC, NFL and affliate promos, 104 paid advertisements ran in my home market. Below is a breakdown of the CTAs included in those 104 spots, including takeaways from reviewing the data and watching the game.

• A whopping 51 percent of advertisers elected to simply run their ad without asking viewers to do anything with a call-to-action. Folks, I'm sorry, but this was marketing malpractice. I love branding as much as the next person, but the Super Bowl is such an expensive platform, you must do more than boost brand recall. You need consumers to buy, opt-in, subscribe, amplify—anything to make your ad last beyond its 30 seconds.
• This year's Super Bowl ads contained more phone numbers than calls to download mobile apps by an 8-to-5 margin. The ratio of SMS calls-to-action was worse—8 to zilch. Attention brand advertisers: All marketing is now direct thanks to the smartphones, tablets and laptops that consumers constantly utilize. And in order to generate direct results from a TV commercial, you must ask the viewer to do something specific on their device. You can't begin a customer on a journey unless you prompt the first step.
• Hashtags are lazy marketing unless you build something around them. The average time a hashtag was on screen during a Super Bowl commercial was less than one second. One second! Not even the most adept-at-texting millennial can capture and type a hashtag that fast. But just GoDaddy, Wix.com and the Twentieth Century Fox marketers for The Kingsman movie seemed to understand that concept. Theirs were of the only spots in which a hashtag appeared on screen for the entire ad. Otherwise, only Budweiser (#UpForWhatever) and Procter & Gamble (#LikeAGirl) leveraged well-established, pre-existing hashtags in their ads.
• Truly social engagement was no where to be found in the TV spots. While Facebook rebounded somewhat from last year's near shutout in ad CTAs, subtract all the hashtags and one could argue there wasn't a single, true social call-to-action in any of the Super Bowl ads. However, if you were on Facebook during the game, you probably saw a lot of friends talking about the game and the ads. And therein lies the potential social magic. Just like Google doesn't need to advertise during the Super Bowl to benefit from all the related search and YouTube traffic, Facebook, Twitter and now SnapChat (appearing in its first CTA thanks to Universal Studios' Pitch Perfect 2) also need not be mentioned in order to have lots of on-site or in-app activity that drives advertising revenue.
• Pre-released ads on YouTube had better CTAs. In this year's Big Game, around 80 percent of advertisers teased their spots on YouTube, Facebook and elsewhere. You can argue whether this trend is spoiling the surprise of seeing ads for the first time during the game, but no one can argue with the outcome—especially Budweiser. The King of Beers was the undisputed leader in Super Bowl pre-releases, with its "Lost Puppy" ad garnering more than 20 million views on YouTube before the game began. Moreover, Budweiser and others employed the opportunity to acquire more YouTube subscribers. In Bud's case, each of its ads included a subscribe link throughout. That means the Super Bowl helped them build a bigger audience for the next content it posts to YouTube.
• And, kudos to BMW America. Their "1994 Internet" ad with Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble was not only funny, it contained an Easter Egg that warmed this email marketer's heart. The info@amfeedback.com email that they discuss in the 1994 Today Show clip actually works! Email it to get your own reply or, if you're the cheating type, go here to see what BMW hid for the tech detectives.

Did you find any other gems among the Super Bowl ads? Be sure to share your thoughts in the comments section.

In closing, here's another thing that's on my mind: There's 364 days until my Cleveland Browns appear in Super Bowl 50. Watch out for the #DawgPound.

Jeff Rohrs (@jkrohrs) is vp, Marketing Insights at Salesforce.

Just when we thought we were Super Bowl'd out, we find something that makes the takes the magic of this year's ads and reimages it—IN LEGO!

British animation house A+C Studios is behind the Brick Bowl—a three-minute journey through some of this year's Super Bowl ads, edited together as a story. It took them 36 hours following the final whistle to deliver the video, which it calls "a new take on the world's most expensive advertising space."

Take a look below as some of the most memorable spots (nine to be exact), including Snickers, Toyota, T-Mobile and Bud Light, are transformed into Legos! To prove they weren't cheating, there's even a mini-Katy Perry halftime show.

They left out the Nationwide kid. But that's because everything is awesome.



CREDITS
Director: Dan Richards
Story: Josh Hicks, Dan Richards
Producer: Liu Batchelor
Executive Producers: Robyn Viney, Julian Hirst
Animation Director: James 'Jamesy' Harvey
Production Manager: Sim Bhachu
Editor: Stuart Clark
Sound design: Jareth Turner, Karl Aiden Bourne
Voice: Dave Eric Smith
Additional Voices: Stuart Clark
Storyboard Artists: Dayle Sanders, Josh Hicks
Stop Motion Animators: James Harvey, Barnaby Dixon, Dave Cubitt, Roos Mattaar, Laura Tofarides, Jordan Wood
Model Makers: Jess Linares, Astrid Goldsmith, Tiffany Monk, Becky Smith, Kyle Roberts
Stage Build: Martin Richards
Production Assistants: Bobby Sparks, Chad Mihaylov, Charlie-Evaristo-Boyce
Digital Animation and VFX: Stuart Clark, Dayle Sanders, Oliver David Lister, Kim Dunne, Nat Urwin
Catering: Rory Fletcher

While you were loving and hating the Super Bowl TV commercials on Sunday, there was a whole other game going on—the radio ads on Westwood One. And now, AdFreak has an exclusive look (or rather, listen) at the winner of the second annual Westwood One Super Bowl Sound Awards, honoring the best radio spots of the game.

The champion this year is Poo-Pourri, the before-you-go toilet spray that can eliminate odors that stink even worse than Pete Carroll's play calls. The spot itself won't be accused of being overly sophisticated (this brand's viral videos aren't, either), but it was a hit with the fans who voted. Have a listen here:

THE WINNER:

THE RUNNERS-UP:

Last year's winner, Motel 6, placed two ads in the top five this year, with longtime spokesman Tom Bodett humorously trying to update his pitch for a new generation. The AutoTune one is quite funny. Listen to those spots here:





Finally, Subway and Exergen rounded out the top five:

More than 40 advertisers participated in the Super Bowl Sound Awards. The ads were available on demand for a week before the game aired Sunday on the more than 700 radio stations broadcasting Westwood One's Super Bowl XLIX coverage, as well as on SiriusXM Radio, NFL.com/Audiopass, NFL Mobile from Verizon and the American Forces Radio Network.

We're still technically more than a year away from the 2016 Super Bowl, but the first ad teaser is here. And of course, it's from Newcastle Brown Ale.

The brewer and its agency, Droga5, evolved their Super Bowl ambush campaign this year from not being able to afford a spot to still not being able to afford one but crowdfunding one with 37 other brands. So far, the strategy for 2016 seems to be getting started really, really early on still still not being able to afford one.

The next Super Bowl will take place on Feb. 7, 2016, which is pretty far in the future. And so Newcastle's teaser, also from Droga5, is heavy on the futuristic imagery.

Check it out below, and visit NewcastleCountdown2016.com for more.



So, how did the 2015 "Band of Brands" campaign do? Newcastle Brown Ale brand director Priscilla Donhert spoke tells Britain's Marketing magazine: "We've seen overwhelmingly positive press coverage, and the feedback from social media has been encouraging. Last year's campaign offered a big lift for Newcastle sales and trial intent—initial results look positive and we're counting on the same effect this year."

CREDITS
Client: Newcastle Brown Ale
Agency: Droga5

You pride yourself on independent thinking—heck, let's say you even have a master's degree in philosophy. But just like any American, you were shopping last weekend for potato chips in Aisle 7 as you prepared for the Big Game party.

Let's say the aisle display for Kettle Chips didn't employ anything resembling Super Bowl-related or football-themed creative, while the cardboard signage for PepsiCo's Lay's next to it was adorned with such insignias. There's a one-in-three chance you grabbed a bag of Lay's because of its creative, according to market research vendor Instantly. Indeed, snack and beverage purchase decisions can be about presentation as much as price and product.

The Los Angeles-based Instantly, which was formerly called uSamp and is announcing its rebrand this week, offers a bevy of market research products and survey services. It posed questions to 299 consumers from Jan. 29 through Feb. 1 to discover what snacks and beverages they were buying for the game and why.

Other key findings included: Consumers react positively to large and eye-catching designs, and PepsiCo has mastered the art of Super Bowl display. When given the choice of Super Bowl advertisers, 32 percent of consumers said they liked PepsiCo products the best. It helps that the Purchase, N.Y.-based soda giant was a chief sponsor of NBC's Big Game telecast, therefore having the right to use official Super Bowl symbols. But the consumer psychology of it all is still pretty interesting.

Check out Instantly's infographic from its new research.

BBDO New York is taking home the inaugural Super Clio for the best commercial in Sunday's Big Game. The agency's Brady Bunch ad for Snickers, featuring Sons of Anarchy actor Danny Trejo and Steve Buscemi, is the latest rendition of the "You're not you when you're hungry" pitch, launched in 2010. And it shows the campaign's jokes are only getting better over time.

The spot won out over three other finalists:

• Loctite's "Positive Feelings" by Fallon, Minneapolis
• Always' "#LikeAGirl" by Leo Burnett, Chicago
• Nomore.org's official NFL Super Bowl ad by Grey, New York

The BBDO commercial shows Marcia Brady brushing her hair and being so grumpy that she turns into villain Trejo (a frequent collaborator of filmmaker Robert Rodriguez). According to Clio, judges chose the commercial for "originality, innovation and stand-out celebrity cameos." Snickers released a Super Bowl teaser on Jan. 21 and the full 30-second spot on Jan. 29, after consumers generated 2.5 million hits in social media requesting to see the ad before the game's kickoff on Feb. 1. BBDO executive creative directors Peter Kain and Gianfranco Arena, who have worked on the Snickers' campaign since its 2010 debut with Betty White, were behind the winning effort.

McCann Worldgroup global creative chairman Rob Reilly came up with the idea for Clio Creative Bowl recognition for advertising's biggest annual event and served as a judge.

"It's really difficult to create a version of the same campaign every year and to keep it fresh," he said of the winning spot. "While you can say you've seen a similar version of the Snickers creative before, we should also applaud the fact that they found a way to keep it fresh and inventive."

BBDO's Kain said it was especially tough for him and his partner, knowing the commercial would mark the brand's return to the Super Bowl after a three-year absence. "You don't want to deviate, but we knew we needed something fresh so we decided to tell the story in the context of the TV show, which is burned into people's minds even though it was only on the air for four years."

Lining up the rights to the show and getting the celebrities on board was complicated enough. But the two BBDO executive creative directors also had to watch all four years of episodes to find a scene in which the Brady parents, sitting on the sofa, interact with the family's two daughters, Marcia and Jan, in just the right way to enable mouth replacement voiceovers.

Clio Creative Bowl judges included Ted Royer, chief creative officer, Droga5; Gerry Graf, founder, chief creative officer, Barton F. Graf 9000; Glenn Cole, founder, chief creative officer, 72andSunny; Colleen DeCourcy, global executive creative director, Wieden + Kennedy; David Lubars, worldwide chief creative officer, BBDO; Susan Credle, U.S. chief creative officer, Leo Burnett; Steve Simpson, North American chief creative officer, Ogilvy & Mather; Rob Schwartz, New York CEO, TBWA\Chiat\Day; and Tim Nudd, creative editor, Adweek. 

The Super Clio trophy was presented to BBDO this afternoon, Feb. 2. Adweek and Clio are owned by affiliates of Guggenheim Partners.

While brands this year spent millions trying to score a Super Bowl hit, one Georgia  lawyer has perfected a formula for creating viral Big Game ads. He's struck gold not once, but twice. Best of all, he only spent $100,000 for this year's spot—a little over $20,000 for airtime in Savannah, Ga., and the rest on production, casting, crew and equipment costs.  

Jamie Casino—yes, that is his legal name—burst into the scene last year with an epic two-minute spot that ran in Savannah, Ga., that narrated the lawyer's shift from criminal defense to personal injury after his brother was murdered. (It's impossible to do it justice by describing it, just know it contains copious amounts of fire, slow-motion sledgehammer scenes and metal music—and that Casino wrote, directed and starred in it himself.) It went viral after the game, garnering more than 5.6 million views on YouTube and scored him a reality TV deal with Warner Horizon Television, which according to him is still in development.

This year, he returned for another two-minute regional spot, this time tackling bullying as well as former Savannah mayor Otis Johnson and his team. Drawing on his own personal experiences of fighting childhood bullies and cancer, Casino applied the same grandiose shots and bombastic themes that one would expect in a Michael Bay movie. The four-week project—full of cackling henchmen, aerial pans of the city, and the most badass angel known to man—boasts the tagline "Bullying is bad. Silence is worse." To drive the point home, he doesn't even mention a phone number or website to contact him at. 

"The Super Bowl is the time of the year where you do things that are out of the box," Casino said. "That typical ad is just not effective during the year, but during the Super Bowl it is because people are looking for those ads. The storytelling, the cinematic footage—that I think works personally, and that's why I decided to take that angle when I do those spots."

Here's what else we learned about Casino's strategy:

He has no filmmaking training

Despite the high cinematic value, Casino said he never studied film. He was an education major in Temple University, where he took some photography classes. He is a fan of cinema, however, and counts Shawshank Redemption and Quentin Tarantino movies among his favorites.

"I don't know why I have certain talents in that area. Maybe they're just natural," he said.

Religion and metal are a huge inspiration

The church sequences, graveyard scenes and angel character all stem from Casino's deeply rooted religious beliefs. But, in case you couldn't tell by the soundtrack (and the themes), Casino is a huge fan of metal bands, especially Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen, and Guns and Roses. Casino licensed the music for the ads from Nick Nolan, whose tracks include "Devil Gets Your Soul" and "Life of Sin."

He's still shocked the first ad went viral

Casino just intended the first ad to be seen by Savannah residents, which is why he brought up local issues with the police chief in his first ad, intending to spark community discussion. He never expected it to get national attention.

"Last year put me in a panic mode," he admitted. "I didn't realize it was going to go viral. Once I got over that I realized, 'Wow man, you can have a positive impact on trying to get people to do the right thing if you put stuff out there.'"

This year's ad is a sequel that explains how Savannah's police chief, who is awaiting sentencing, got appointed by what Casino deems a corrupt system. He's glad that people are talking about his spot, because it's putting Savannah politics on the map.

"You take a chance when you do stuff like this because you never know how it's going to turn out," he said. "When things do get out there outside your city, it's good because people are watching it, seeing the issues that are going on and probably relating to it."

He's open to doing commercials for other brands

Both commercials were produced by Casino's company, Smash House Productions, which has only created spots for Casino's business to date. Unfortunately, he said there likely will not be a Casino's Law 3 next year. However, he is open to creating ads for other brands if he agrees with their message.

"There's certain things I'm not for, like drinking. Budweiser makes big money on booze and stuff. I would do ads for smaller companies that are more touching. I'm an emotional guy," he said. 

Five of this week's videos on the Adweek/VidIQ top branded video chart (which tracked video views between Jan. 25 and Feb. 1) are Super Bowl advertisers, showing the advantages of releasing an ad before the game.

Budweiser, T-Mobile, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Nationwide all placed on this week's chart, with Bud's "Lost Dog" grabbing the No. 1 spot. The brewer's ad went up on YouTube on Jan. 28—four days before the Super Bowl—and racked up 17.8 million views before it aired Sunday night. "Lost Dog" was also shared 104,000 times on Facebook and tweeted 241 times.

VidIQ's data claims that Nationwide was the only brand last week to run ads against its video (which, to be fair, is for a teaser and not one of the brand's two actual Super Bowl spots). According to VidIQ, YouTube does not disclose which of its videos also include ads, so the numbers are a bit of an educated guess. We've reached out to YouTube to check if Budweiser, T-Mobile, BMW and Mercedes-Benz ran ads last week and will update this story if we hear back.

Now that the Super Bowl is over, Budweiser's video has been viewed about 25 million times, meaning 71 percent of its views came before the game. T-Mobile's commercial with Kim Kardashian has generated more than 15 million views, while BMW claims just more than 14 million. Nationwide's teaser has been watched 7 million times and its full-length commercial has 1.2 million views. (The far more controversial Nationwide Super Bowl ad, "Make Safe Happen," is closing in on 6 million views.)

While not an official Super Bowl ad, Skittles' fake press conference with Marshawn Lynch grabbed the No. 6 spot on the chart. As of Jan. 31, the video had been watched 4.32 million times and shared 22,500 times on Facebook.

Check out the full list of the top videos in the VidIQ-powered interactive video player below.

NOTE: Adweek's VideoWatch Chart, powered by VidIQ, reveals the Top 10 Branded Web Videos on YouTube every week. The chart tracks more than just pure views, as VidIQ incorporates sharing data from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, among other data sources, in an effort to measure true engagement. Every video is also ranked with VidIQ's proprietary Score, which helps judge the likelihood of a video being promoted in YouTube Related Videos, Search and Recommended Videos.

Coca-Cola has suspended its #MakeItHappy automated social campaign after a prank from Gawker had the brand inadvertently tweeting out several lines from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

The soda brand's campaign, introduced during Sunday's Super Bowl, encouraged Twitter users to mark negative tweets with the #MakeItHappy hashtag. Then, the brand turned those words into cute art images using ASCII lettering code.

But Gawker soon noticed a tweet from Coke's Twitter account that had turned the "Fourteen Words" slogan of white nationalism into an ASCII dog.

"Even when the text is shaped like a dog, it is disconcerting to see Coca-Cola, the soda company, urge its social media followers to safeguard the existence and reproduction of white racists," wrote Gawker editor Max Read. 

To prove the point, Gawker created a Twitter bot, @MeinCoke, which tweeted lines of Mein Kampf at Coca-Cola to see if the brand would turn lines from Hitler's autobiographical manifesto into art. It did. This afternoon, the brand stopped the art-based social campaign altogether, no longer responding to tweets that used the #MakeItHappy hashtag.

A spokeswoman emailed this statement to Adweek: "The #MakeItHappy message is simple: The Internet is what we make it, and we hoped to inspire people to make it a more positive place. It's unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn't. Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign."

The debacle illustrates that major brands like Coke can't make campaigns featuring automatic tweets without the expectation that it will likely get highjacked, a fact the New England Patriots learned with a recent jersey giveaway. 

Here's a sample of the prank's resulting tweets:

@MeinCoke We turned the hate you found into something happy. RT to make people :) http://t.co/rCaGZrEzRUpic.twitter.com/B0E5M3bCfW

— Coca-Cola (@CocaCola) February 2, 2015

@MeinCoke We turned the hate you found into something happy. RT to make people :) http://t.co/hKB97rQzOypic.twitter.com/rkKKKSgTdl

— Coca-Cola (@CocaCola) February 2, 2015

Bully Pulpit Interactive surveyed 700 people before the Super Bowl and another 700 folks after to gauge which Big Game advertisers achieved the greatest brand lift, a metric designed to identify a positive shift in consumer awareness and perception due to a paid media campaign.

All of the respondents watched the game, and 200 were in the coveted millennial demographic. Below are the key takeaways from the online panel.

• GoDaddy (+7), Budweiser (+5), Esurance (+5) and Loctite (+4) saw the greatest increases in brand favorability from their ads. So GoDaddy's decision to pull "Puppy Mill" for "Working" at the last second proved wise.
• Nationwide's creepy spot about a dead child seemed like a social media nightmare, and BPI's findings aren't much better. Unlike Esurance's good showing, Nationwide's brand favorability dropped 5 points.
• Just 13 percent of the participants recalled Wix's "It's That Easy" spot.
• BPI found that GoDaddy's ad practically had no social engagement compared with McDonald's spot. But while GoDaddy's brand favorability spiked, McDonald's was essentially flat.
• Hey creatives, in case you forgot, reinforcing the brand in a $4.5 million spot is pretty huge. For example, 10 percent of those surveyed thought they saw an ad from Audi or VW even though both brands were not Big Game advertisers, while just 20 percent recalled the Mercedes-Benz ad that actually aired. And nearly a quarter of the participants thought Royal Caribbean aired an entertaining ad. But the brand was nowhere to be seen—the Super Bowl watchers were actually remembering a Carnival Cruise spot. In contrast, 78 percent of viewers remembered seeing one of Budweiser's three ads.

And here's a further breakdown from Bully Pulpit's study.

5 Brands That Won Favorability Among General Consumers
GoDaddy (+7 percent)
Budweiser (+ 5 percent)
Esurance (+ 5 percent)
Loctite (+ 4 percent)
BMW (+ 3 percent)

3 Brands That Got Consumers Interested in Buying
Loctite (+ 2 percent)
Budweiser (+ 1 percent)
Lexus (+ 1 percent)

5 Brands That Lost the Most Millennials at Check Out
Dove (-14 percent)
Pepsi (-10 percent)
McDonald's (-9 percent)
Nissan (-7 percent)
Toyota (-5 percent)

Top 5 Brands That Won Super Bowl Ad Recall
Budweiser (78 percent)
GoDaddy (60 percent)
NFL (59 percent)
Nationwide (59 percent)
McDonald's (54 percent)

Lastly, Bully Pulpit—best known for its work for the Democratic Party—appears to be delving into consumer brands more than it once did.

"As we bring insights from our political work over to the commercial space, we want to keep asking the tough questions, such as: Did this ad really work?" explained Andrew Bleeker, president. "Our goal is to help surface the right metrics to allow brands to optimize for persuasion as well as activity. The Super Bowl was a natural moment to try and test that."

Right Shark and Left Shark had great time at the Super Bowl in Arizona. (Well, one of them had a better time than the other.) But now it's back to the grind. And that means returning to the ESPN offices in snowy Bristol, Conn., and getting back to their day jobs—next to every other athlete, mascot and halftime-show dance partner in the world.

And here, we even get to see who's underneath those suddenly famous fish costumes.

Wieden + Kennedy New York's "This Is SportsCenter" campaign is always pretty fresh and memorable, but it's great to see them jumping on this topic—which fits the campaign's goofy humor so well.

If Nationwide was the somber buzzkill of this year's Super Bowl, Avocados From Mexico was the life of the party, earning more than a billion media impressions along the way.

The association's quirky ad in the first quarter comically explained the origin of Mexican avocados: as a first-round pick in a draft event for countries to select their indigenous plants and animals. Hosted by a bearded, God-like figure, the "First Draft Ever" also featured commentary from ex-NFL stars Jerry Rice and Doug Flutie.

Two versions of the ad, from agency GSD&M, were released on Jan. 30 (two days before the game) and have since generated more than 1 million views on YouTube. During the Super Bowl, the avocado association started unveiling a series of seven more online videos (see below) that laid out Mexico's subsequent draft picks.

Collectively, those executions, a teaser ad and corresponding media coverage amassed some 1.1 billion media impressions, helping the brand achieve the second most social buzz out of the game, after Procter & Gamble's Always (and its "Like a Girl" ad from Leo Burnett), according to Adobe Social. Views of all of the videos across YouTube, Facebook and iAD totaled 1.48 million, according to Ketchum, the public relations agency for Avocados From Mexico.

Not bad for a concept that started with God knocking over a table of the world, with avocados landing on Mexico.

That was the initial idea that GSD&M expanded into a prehistoric NFL-style draft, which the Austin, Texas-based agency pitched to win the Super Bowl project in October, according to chief creative officer Jay Russell.

"God was in his study  ... and there was a table of the world behind him. He kind of bumped into it, and avocados fell on Mexico," Russell said.

"So, it was this very surreal, weird idea that ended up with, 'That doesn't make any sense, but take God out of it and how do you put that idea into a football context?' 'Well, nobody has really done anything with the draft.' And we knew that avocados are indigenous to Mexico. So, they were just there."

A month later, Rice and Flutie signed on, and in early December, the agency shot the ad on a sound stage in Hollywood.

The two-day shoot was tricky, given the presence of live creatures like a lion, fox, armadillo and zebra. Zebras, for example, are sensitive to noise, so the agency had to keep the set relatively quiet when filming them, said Alvaro Luque, president of Avocados From Mexico.

Matt Dilmore of Biscuit Filmworks was the director, chosen for the whimsical tone he suggested for the script, according to Russell. "He gave it its own personality," Russell said.

Given the success of the first appearance of a fruit on the Super Bowl, the avocado growers' association is considering a return next year. And while this year's price tag was high—$4.5 million for airtime during the game and another $4.5 million across other NBCU programming—the association simply shifted dollars it would have otherwise spent in the course of its fiscal year, Luque said. The group typically spends about $15 million in media annually, according to Kantar Media.

Havas Media bought Avocados From Mexico's Super Bowl time early—way back in March 2014, setting the stage for the ad search, which began in June and involved concept testing. While GSD&M landed the plum assignment, Arnold remains the brand's lead creative agency, and Luque expressed satisfaction with the work of both shops. Arnold has worked for the growers since 2013.

Beyond the massive media impressions, Luque credits buzz in the run-up to the Super Bowl appearance for driving weekly sales of Mexican avocados in the U.S. beyond the threshold of 50 million pounds for the first time. And that happened twice in the two weeks leading to the Feb. 1 game. As a result, Mexican growers expect their U.S. market share to grow from 67 percent at the end of the last fiscal year (June 30, 2014) to more than 70 percent at the beginning of the next fiscal year, on July 1, Luque said. The next biggest share belongs to California growers, at around 20 percent.

Ultimately the board of directors for Avocados From Mexico will decide whether to return to the Big Game. In Luque's mind, though, "We need to be there. I think that the Super Bowl suits us, and this is a great part of the year to advertise and reinforce our brand."

Below, you can check out the seven follow-up First Draft Ever videos, starring "Not Doug Flutie" and "Not Jerry Rice."

Matt Jauchius' demise at Nationwide surprised roster shops like McKinney and Ogilvy & Mather even though it came after a public pummeling of the brand's "dead kid" Super Bowl ad.

Jauchius had worked at Nationwide since 2006 and risen from vp of strategy to chief strategy officer to chief marketing officer in 2010. Along the way, Nationwide's profile grew, in large part because of its relationship with McKinney, its lead creative agency since 2009. In fact, the brand's success at repositioning itself as a grown-up in a category that gets pretty silly made Jauchius a Brand Genius in the eyes of Adweek.

Ogilvy entered the picture last year, ostensibly to handle advertising around Nationwide's deal with Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning. But the WPP Group shop went beyond that, going shoulder-to-shoulder with McKinney on a Super Bowl ad promoting the brand's concerted push to prevent accidents involving children.

The somber ad features a boy describing all the things he should have grown up to do but didn't because, "I died from an accident." Preventing childhood accidents is certainly a worthy cause—particularly for an insurer—but the tone, message and execution felt out of place on a day of parties, beer and football. As such, viewers took to social media and skewered the ad mercilessly.

Meanwhile, McKinney produced a lighthearted spot featuring Mindy Kaling that felt more appropriate for the brand and the spirit of the day. Ah, but now both agencies have to start over with a new marketing chief, albeit one from Nationwide.

Jauchius' replacement, Terrance Williams, previously was president of Nationwide Agribusiness. He too is a company veteran, having joined in 1995.

Why should the players in packaged goods, financial services and cosmetics have all the fun?

The automakers Volkswagen Group and BMW are now part of Mediapalooza 2015, an unprecedented year of media reviews with spending exceeding $16 billion—and counting.

VW's review is global and encompasses all of the group's brands—Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche—according to sources. Collectively, those brands spend more than $1 billion in media annually worldwide, including $600 million in the U.S.

VW Group employs several media agencies around the world, but its primary shop is WPP Group's MediaCom, which is expected to defend. The process will most likely extend into late fall. MediaCom declined to comment, and VW could not immediately be reached.

BMW's media search, which has yet to begin, is for the U.S. market, where spending exceeds $150 million. One source expects it to start in August. Interpublic Group's UM is the incumbent.

UM did not return messages. A BMW representative reached by email said, "We don't currently have an agency review underway for our media buying."

Asked if the company planned a review since its last media search took place many years ago, the rep said, "It is a standard BMW process to put all contracts up for review every few years. I cannot speak to when we will conduct that review."

UM landed the account in 2009, beating out four other finalists. At the time, the business shifted from then incumbent GSD&M.

During this year's Super Bowl, BMW aired a 60-second ad from Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners that featured Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble marveling at the technology behind the BMW i3. "Newfangled Idea" was released online six days before the game, racking up more than 3.8 million views in five days.

Here's another look at that ad:

Exactly 50 years ago yesterday, the Frito-Lay snack brand (maker of Fritos, Cheetos and Ruffles) merged with Pepsi-Cola (the famous soda) to form PepsiCo. The merger was big news in 1965, but few predicted the corporate colossus it would become. Today, PepsiCo's 22 brands each generate more than $1 billion in annual sales. But if there's a single reason consumers recognize PepsiCo's brands, it's because of its ads. PepsiCo introduced jingles impossible to extricate from one's head ("muncha-buncha Fritos go with lunch!"), and from Day 1 signed the biggest celebrities of the day as endorsers, from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for Tropicana to Madonna and Michael Jackson for Pepsi. Adweek got both of PepsiCo's global CMOs on the phone for this exclusive chat about five decades of marketing.

Ram Krishnan 

Adweek: Celebrities in your spots often clown around—like Elton John as the Pepsi King in 2012's Super Bowl spot. Is goofing off an enticement for them to sign?
Lowden: Celebrities feel like they can let their hair down in our advertising. We bring out a side of them that they can't often display. They're always on stage or on the field and they have to perform, so advertising gives them a chance to get into a side that they haven't normally shown.

It wasn't long ago that celebs (and fans) viewed endorsements as "selling out." Have you had to contend with that issue?
Lowden: If they're just a poster child for us, then that's a problem. But we give them a platform they normally wouldn't have, let them show a different side of their personality. And we get them into the creativity.

Like, how?
Lowden: We worked with Beyoncé recently, and she was involved in the script creativity, the style of the production, how it looked and how it worked.
 

Simon Lowden 

In 1984, PepsiCo signed Michael Jackson for a reported $5 million. But Jackson was on top of the world in 1984. He didn't have to dance for Pepsi. Why did he?
Lowden: He did it because he wanted to put himself in a place where he wouldn't be expected to be seen. He was huge, performing in front of thousands. But PepsiCo gave him a platform to be associated with a brand that has a reach in over 188 markets in the world.

So you're arguing that brand endorsements expand and magnify celebrity status today instead of eroding it.
Krishnan: Yes. It gives them a stage to define who they are, which they might not be able to do with their music or the stuff that they're working on.

Ten years ago, Doritos did "Crash the Super Bowl," which showed how far user-generated content could go. Was there any nervousness about buying 30 seconds for $4 million and airing amateur work?
Krishnan: Completely. If you'd told me that we'd be giving consumers a chance to be on the world's biggest stage, I'd think you were kidding me. But consumers want to be involved with a brand. Anyone with a smartphone is a creative these days.

Gatorade remixed 1991's "Be Like Mike" tune this year. I've always wondered: Did Michael Jordan drink Gatorade before he signed his deal with you?
Lowden: We know he used it as part of his daily routine. Authenticity leads to credibility. He loved that song. He used it. It became him. He was incredibly supportive of us bringing it back.

Celebrity endorsing has frequently involved people on the downward slope of their careers. PepsiCo signs them at the peak of their fame—which can't be cheap. Is one of the takeaways here that a brand has to be prepared to spend big to make a marketing splash?
Lowden: We get them as they rise, and it's not just about a check. It's about providing a platform for stars to grow their popularity. David Beckham was a soccer player for one season in the U.K. He became an icon because of the work we did with him at Pepsi. It becomes a symbiotic relationship.

Krishnan: We have well-loved brands with a huge footprint, and that's the attraction. Celebrities come to us, not the other way around. Together, we create a cultural moment. That ad does something both for us and for them.

Monster.com is searching for a new lead creative agency amid its split with BBDO, which has handled the brand since 2007.

The Weston, Mass.-based job listings site is working with Boston's Pile + Co. on the search. Representatives at BBDO and Monster said the decision to part was mutual.

Sources believe that Monster, which also works with agencies like 360i and Brand Content, may consolidate all of its business with one lead shop as a result of the review - speculation dismissed by a Monster rep.

When BBDO won the global Monster.com business eight years ago, the site spent $155 million in measured media, according to TNS Media Intelligence, although overseas spending was thought to increase that amount to over $200 million.

As Monster.com faced new online competition from LinkedIn, Salesforce and aggregators' listings, the site began cutting back on that media-driven image building in favor of online efforts. Last year Monster.com spent only $15 million on measured media, according to Kantar Media.

Typical of Monster's new approach is an online brand campaign, which BBDO aimed at millennials and launched in March. Similarly, a marketer known for its award-winning Super Bowl ads skipped a big-bucks presence in the game this year in favor of a Twitter effort that faked out followers with a tweet celebrating the Seattle Seahawks' victory, when the New England Patriots actually won the game. (Followers had to click through the Tweet image to get to the punch line.)

In going up against new competitors, Monster.com is using data analysis and social-ad targeting as it launches new recruiter tools like Monster Social Job Ads, Monster Twitter Cards and TalentBin by Monster. Last month the company said the site's bookings have gained momentum as it posted a 6 percent gain, year over year, in Monster's core North American careers segment. But while page views in May increased 36 percent over the year-earlier month, the number of unique visitors to Monster.com slid 29 percent to 11.2 million.

Wieden + Kennedy in New York has won the creative business of America's largest beer brand, Bud Light. And owner Anheuser-Busch InBev has also tapped the agency's Amsterdam office to lead the Corona brand globally.

"We've always looked at Wieden from the sidelines as an agency that one day we would potentially want to work with," Jorn Socquet, Anheuser-Busch InBev's vp of marketing in U.S., told Adweek.

Bud Light and Corona's business shift comes on the heels of Wieden + Kennedy's split from another beer brand, Heineken, just a few weeks earlier. Measured media spending for Bud Light is estimated at $350 million.

Wieden + Kennedy takes the reins from BBDO, which has run Bud Light's creative business since 2013, delivering two breakout Super Bowl spots for the brand. The brand is covered for its creative through the end of the year, according to Socquet, who said the first work from W+K will "probably be for Super Bowl next year." 

"We are extremely proud of the work we've done with BBDO," said Socquet. "But we always want to improve ourselves, and from our perspective, in order to raise the bar in the next few months and years, we believe that Wieden + Kennedy is a partner that is better suited to get us to that next level." 

Earlier this year, the brand did face some backlash for bottles of the Anheuser-Busch beer bearing the line, "The perfect beer for removing 'No' from your vocabulary for the night." The tag, which the brand said came from creative shop BBDO, upset quite a few consumers. But, according to Socquet, that has nothing to do with the shop's split from BBDO. 

"[We] shared responsibility to get there [with the tagline], but the accountability 100 percent lies with AB-Inbev, and it is absolutely not the reason why we were separating with BBDO today," said Socquet. 

Andrew Robertson, president and CEO of BBDO Worldwide, issued a statement: "BBDO will no longer be working on Bud Light in the U.S. We gave it our best shot, and I would like to thank all of our people who worked so energetically and diligently on this business over the past two years. We did some work we are proud of, and wish our Bud Light clients and their new agency partner well."

It is too early to say if Bud Light will continue with its "Up for Whatever," campaign or its Whatever, USA festivities. "Maybe we continue with Whatever, USA, maybe we don't," said Socquet. "But in any case we will have a very hard look at it, and if it is worth doing it a third time we will bring it back. If not, we will do something even bigger and bolder than what we did with Whatever, USA."

Wieden + Kennedy's agency culture also impacted Bud Light's decision to move its business. "If you look at the trust with Wieden + Kennedy, they have longstanding relationships with a lot of partners throughout the world," said Socquet. "Predominantly, of course, their flagship partnership with Nike. Those are the kinds of partnerships we want to develop, with agencies and all of those marketing partners throughout the world. We truly see this as a long-term relationship of like-minded organizations from a cultural perspective." 

"A-B InBev is a very unique company with a global portfolio of brands that is the envy of the beer industry," said Dave Luhr, president of Wieden + Kennedy, in a statement. "They are strong in talent and culture and high in passion and ambition. Reminds me of an agency I know. We are fortunate to be starting our relationship. Creatively and culturally, I can't think of a better partnership."

The cost of advertising during the Super Bowl continues to rise, setting CBS up for a record haul for next February's big game.

During the company's earnings call on Wednesday, CBS Corp.'s CEO and president Leslie Moonves told investors that CBS is getting $5 million for a 30-second spot in next February's Super Bowl, which will be the 50th edition of the big game. "Super Bowl advertising is already proving to be more lucrative than ever, with 30-second spots selling for $5 million and additional digital revenue being generated for Super Bowl ads online," he said.

Back in February, Moonves predicted that CBS would get "north of $5 million" for ads but had been selling them for $4.6 million to $4.7 million. This year will also mark the first time Super Bowl ads will run both on air and on the livestream of the game; advertisers previously purchased ads for the game's livestream separately.

The cost of Super Bowl airtime has continued to rise as live sports remain one of the few drivers of major viewership in today's time-shifted world. The $5 million price tag represents an 11 percent jump from the $4.5 million that NBC brought in last February. That game drew north of 114 million viewers, the most-watched TV telecast in U.S. history.

The NFL returns to the gridiron on Sunday with the annual Hall of Fame Game preseason tilt, between the Minnesota Vikings and Pittsburgh Steelers. The season officially kicks off Sept. 10 with the Tom Brady-less New England Patriots hosting the Steelers.

Super Bowl 50 is set for Feb. 7 at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.

The answers to "Which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner's favorite?" or "What is Rob Gronkowski's favorite number between 1 and 100?" will now play out in prime time on live TV.

The NFL, in its bid to see just how far it can stretch fans' insatiable appetite for all things football, is planning to move its annual circus show—otherwise known as Super Bowl media day—to prime time this season.

Interesting tidbit heard at owners' meeting: NFL is talking about making Super Bowl 50 Media Day a Media Night instead. Prime time TV.

— Mike Garafolo (@MikeGarafolo) August 11, 2015

In the past, media-day interviews had been relegated to short clips on the local news or SportsCenter. But the NFL has turned media day into a full-blown spectacle with live coverage across a variety of networks (most notably, the NFL Network). The plan would be for media day, which is typically held on the Tuesday of Super Bowl week, to move to Monday night. (Though, with this year's Super Bowl in San Francisco, it actually will be late afternoon, locally).

For the uninitiated, media day brings together players and coaches from the two Super Bowl contenders, forcing them to spend hours answering questions from a throng of international reporters, as Seahawks star Richard Sherman memorably visualized last year:

Media Day was a blast! pic.twitter.com/5nNwtOQQmv

— Richard Sherman (@RSherman_25) January 28, 2014

Lately, however, media day has become less about football and more about the offbeat wackiness that comes from the questions themselves ... 

#BillBelichek answer on his fav stuffed animal. #dropthemic#SBMediaDay

— Scott Hanson (@ScottHanson) January 27, 2015

Reporter: "You're Canadian?" Jon Ryan: "Yup." Rep: "Do you like Pontoon." Ryan: "What?" Rep: "Pontoon." Ryan: "Poutine?" Rep: "Yes Poutine."

— James Duthie (@tsnjamesduthie) January 27, 2015

... Or, from the media:

Yep, it's #SBMediaDaypic.twitter.com/S8auDMYEvr

— NFL (@NFL) January 27, 2015

Earlier this year, Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch provided the only highlight-worthy material when he made headlines for giving the same eight-word answer to every question. The whole kerfuffle between the notoriously quiet Lynch and reporters became a week-long story of the media chasing its own tail.

Will viewers tune in to watch players answer questions about their favorite member of The Avengers or whether the Super Bowl is a "must-win" game? The NFL is betting on it. Or, maybe the league realizes it needs a more mature audience if Gronkowski is going to be reading from the sequel to A Gronking to Remember.