Super Bowl Social Media

Last weekend was one of the most celebrated sports days in America. Whether or not your favorite team was playing in Super Bowl 2015 (sad Packers fan here), I'm guessing many of you tuned in to the game at some point on Sunday. Other than the game, many viewers were interested in catching the latest commercials, as Super Bowl Sunday usually provides some of the best commercials of the year. Following my twitter account and searching different hashtags about the game and the commercials almost provided more entertainment than the game itself.


One of the commercials that caught my attention the most was the Nationwide commercial during one of the timeouts of the game. As I was on Twitter, I found that I wasn't the only one that was caught off guard with the message being portrayed by this popular insurance company. If you missed the commercial, go ahead and take a minute to watch it here:



Here were some of the tweets that followed it:

So why would Nationwide go through with publicizing this risky ad? The reason big companies like Nationwide pay big money (the 2015 rate was about $9 million per minute) during the Super Bowl is to connect with the sports fans. Companies know football is one of the biggest entertainment providers today so they took this opportunity to reach out to these football fans and catch their attention and inform them about what their company has to offer. These viewers then turn to social media where they can discuss and connect with other fans. The point of the eerie commercial was to get people talking, to get their name out there, and to create awareness of their product. Social media created a great platform for this goal.

The following was released a few days after the ad and provides a great explanation for why the company did what they did and shows just how effective social media's role was in spreading the word.

Nationwide created a lot of attention and got the audience talking. They met their goal of getting a reaction from the people. If you heard anyone talking about the Nationwide commercial, or any other commercial aired during the game (that Budweiser puppy is always a crowd fav), than the company succeeded. After this year, I am anxious to see what the marketing department for Nationwide comes up with for Super Bowl 2016!