Super Psyched: WSJ and NetBase Track Super Bowl

I’ve never been too big on football, but I happen to be married to a diehard fan and have two nephews who think the Patriots walk on water, so there was no question that the Super Bowl was going to be on in my house this weekend. Originally from New Jersey, I probably should have been focused on rooting for the Giants yesterday, but because of the business I’m in, many of my clients and my clients’ clients were advertising yesterday – so my excitement was all about the commercials. And according to Saturday February 4^th’s installment of the Wall Street Journal Sentiment Tracker, I wasn’t the only one: 40% of conversations on Facebook and Twitter revolved around the anticipation for the commercials. Check out the rest of the conversations in the analysis below, powered by NetBase:

For last year’s Super Bowl, I did an analysis on the big commercials, so thought I’d see how this year’s ads stacked up in social media, from when they aired yesterday to now. A personal favorite in our house was the TaxAct commercial featuring a little boy relieving himself in a baby pool – my husband laughed so hard, I thought he’d do the same! And like many social media users, our CEO, Peter Caswell, couldn’t stop raving about the
dancing M&M. Below is a Brand Passion Index on some of the most buzzed about commercials grabbing airtime during yesterday’s game:

In this graphic, the amount of chatter about a brand is indicated by the size of the bubble, while the placement of the bubble shows the intensity of passion.  

From the graph, you can see that M&Ms won with sentiment and passion, but what’s interesting is how polarizing Chrysler was – people couldn’t decide if they loved it or hated it! Here are some of the verbatim surfaced about the commercials:

The M&M Super Bowl commercial was amazing!

The Doritos commercial where the dog buried the cat was THE hands down winner, in my opinion.

Budweiser and Coca-cola are dominating the super bowl commercials.

So which was your favorite commercial? And what were you most looking forward to about Super Bowl XLVI?