It's been a big week in digital marketing, thanks largely to Super Bowl 50. Here are 9 stats that caught our eye in the past several days:
1. Mobile-social video views rival ... the Super Bowl?
Gatorade ran a Super Bowl Sunday ad on Snapchat that featured tennis star Serena Williams getting virtually dunked with the sports drink. The mobile-social video garnered 100 million views by midday Monday, per Gatorade, and that figure is reasonably close to the number of U.S. viewers—119 million—who took in the Big Game on TV.
2. Far better than just OK
OK Go on Thursday unveiled its music video for the song "Upside Down & Inside Out," only releasing the clip on Facebook. The alt-rock group's video garnered a whopping 11.2 million views in its first nine hours on the site. Talk about a strategy blasting out of the gate.
3. Facebook ages in the Western world
Millennials make up a smaller share of Facebook's users in Western markets than in developing nations, according to a We Are Social report. In the U.S., for instance, there are 17 percent more people over the age of 40 using the social network than their younger counterparts. Additionally, 33 percent of Facebook's audience is under age 30. By comparison, in India and Indonesia, 75 percent of its users are millennials or younger.
4. Small businesses stress mobile
Mobile is a big area of growth for 49 percent of small- to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), per Thrive Analytics' 2016 Local Pulse Report. That was the top marketing concern among the 1,100 SMBs that took part in the research.
5. Internet insurer scores in a huge way
Esurance gave away $50,000 to several people who retweeted its Super Bowl pregame ad hashtag, #esurancesweepstakes, and it gave $250,000 to a grand-prize winner. The hashtag was tweeted 2.48 million times by Monday afternoon, helping generate 1.5 billion media impressions.
6. Twitter woes continue
Twitter could have really used a big fourth-quarter boost when it came to user growth but didn't get it. According to the San Francisco company's earnings statement, total monthly active users (MAUs) remained at 320 million in Q4—the same number it had the previous quarter. Total MAUs in the U.S. actually fell slightly, from 66 million to 65 million, while international users stayed at about 254 million. At the same time, revenue totaled $710 million for the quarter, a 48 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2014.
7. Money well spent?
Back to the Super Bowl: Adweek looked at what the $5 million cost of a 30-second Big Game ad could get you if you spent that much on digital ads instead. Just one example: Sources said a marketer could buy 10.5 premium Instagram ad campaigns for that price. Read about other theoretical alternatives to Super Bowl spots here.
8. Beyoncé rules halftime
During the peak of the Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé shared the stage with Coldplay and Bruno Mars, but she still stole the show. The pop songstress pulled in 147,000 tweets a minute compared with 83,000 tweets about Coldplay, per Spredfast. Inside Levi's Stadium, the singer was tagged in 60 pictures per minute on Instagram.
9. Pepsi beat Coke at the Big Game
If Beyoncé's supposedly controversial nod to the Black Panthers during the Pepsi-sponsored halftime show had an impact on the brand, it seemed to be largely positive. For the five days surrounding the Super Bowl, worldwide mentions of Pepsi were 24 percent higher than they were for Coke, according to location data company Geofeedia.
And Pepsi's 1992 Super Bowl send-up with Cindy Crawford and James Corden probably didn't hurt, either. Here's the ad, which has accrued 685,000 YouTube views since Feb. 7: