There are some interesting observations:

The Pepsi ad, while tops on views, comments, and number of ratings, actually didn’t rate as highly as the the others. My guess is that it has more informative than entertainment value and thus does not excite people as much to make a high rating.

The Bud Light ad received lots of views, but didn’t really engage people to make comments or ratings. People probably just agreed that cutting back on beer is not a good idea.

The SoBe 3D Lizards ad raised interest and comments, but wasn’t really rated either even though there were lots of special effects and the cool idea of a 3D ad.

The Bridgestone Astronauts ad was rated the highest, but it didn’t receive anywhere near the same number of new views as the others.

A similar effect is visible for the Hulu ad, which came second in rank, but has even less views than the Astronauts.

Now, other sites have also published rankings for the Superbowl ads, so let’s compare our outcome with that of others:

The methodologies between these rankings are very different. The USA Today is an online survey, the Nielseon IAG one is a panel, Tweetbowl measured the number of tweets on a particular ad, and Vquence the number of views on YouTube of the ads. However, there are some similarities.

Clearly, there are some common winners:

• Doritos – Crystal Ball
• Careerbuilder.com
• Doritos – Power of Crunch
• Pepsi – Refresh Anthem (now at 1.5M views at YouTube!)
  
• Pedigree
• Bud Light – Meeting
• Bridgestone – Potato Head

Some other are only on one top 10 list:

• Cars.com
• Budweiser – Clydesdale Generations
• NFL (isn’t even on most lists of ads shown)
• Etrade – Singing Baby
• Pepsi Max – I’m Good
• Hulu
• GoDaddy – Shower
• GI Joe
• Star Trek (though I am uncertain this one is the actual ad)
  
• GE – Scarecrow
• HR Block – Death and Taxes
• Miller – 1 Second

 Feel free to make up your own personal favorite. I really quite like the last one – a one second ad by Miller of a guy screaming “High Life”.

UPDATE (4th Feb): According to Nielsen, the 2009 Superbowl draw a record 98.7M viewers which gives it record a CPM of $30.39.

According to Suite101, advertising at superbowl is a strategic marketing endeavor for the big companies that is worthwhile. E-Trade for example reported a 32% increase in newly opened and funded brokerage accounts in the week following the debut of the first two talking baby spots last year, and had more than 5 million total online ad viewings and 5 million searches for its ads following the 2008 game. This year, they built again on the talking baby idea, releasing the a superbowl ad and a related ad, but also building social activity around these through a Facebook page, a twitter channel, and their YouTube channel.

In fact, according to the Online Marketer Blog, most of the advertisers decided this year to support their superbowl ad with online social activity – mostly through micro-sites or an additional set of Web pages on their usual Web location, but also some Facebook pages and Twitter channels. All of the ads this year were published to YouTube, some with fully targeted brand channels. Only few ventured into full social advertising activities: “Out of the 54 commercials shown during the actual game, 17 had no online engagement at all – not even a URL. Almost one third = 31.48% – planned for no interactionwith their customers after the game.” Here is their analysis for the first and the second half of the game.

It is amazing to see so little online engagement from the advertisers when they already have to spend such a large amount of money on these ads. With more social activities and customer interaction, the effect of the ads could be extended much longer and the huge spend becomes a lot more worthwhile.

At Vquence we started monitoring the ads as published on YouTube and will report on their successes. You can get a good overview of the ads on the YouTube Adblitz channel. Also, here is the panel-based ranking by USA today. We will see if the actual views on YouTube can result in a similar ranking.

Finally, here are some interesting observations about the content of the ads that were aired this year.

As a technical first, the ads from Dreamworks for Monsters vs Alien and from PepsiCo for SoBe lifewater were in 3D. This may be the beginning of a new set of 3D movies for our theatres.

An interesting new advertiser to the field was Ed McMahon’s Cash4Gold. This is not a typical advertiser at the Superbowl and the quality of the ad does not compare to your typical special-effects-rich, entertaining superbowl ad. However, it is a mirror of the current financial situation.

Overall, the ads were not as light and fun as in previous years, but had a dominantly violent character. Also, ads with explicit sexual references had been pulled, in particular the ones from PETA on Veggie Sex and Ashley Madison on Married Affairs.

Finally, a large number of the ads were trailers for upcoming movies by Sony Pictures, Disney/Pixar, Universal Pictures, DreamWorks, and Paramount as well as several ads for new NBC shows and a rather funny ad for Hulu, the online video site.

Several lists of top viral or popular videos have been published. We now look at the top video ads of all time, the top ones of 2008, and the top spenders of 2008. I have extracted all the key stats as of today from YouTube.

The following ads are the top 5 of all time (according to the “Great Advertising, Clever Ads” blog).

What I noticed while collecting the stats was that while I only point out the top performing copy of the commercial, there are often many copies. Most of these copies pale in view count against the main copy, however sometimes (as is the case for the Levis 2007 collection ad) the copies can also achieve hundreds of thousands of views. So, an aggregate view count would be a lot more representative for the popularity of the commercials than the view count of the highest achiever.

Also I noticed that going beyond the top 5 makes it really muddy, since many commercials have around 6M views.

Please note that movie trailers and game trailers have been kep out of this ranking – e.g. “Quantum of Solace” achieved about 8M views across the top 8 copies of the trailer, though every single copy didn’t achieve more than 2.1M. Music videos are also outside the ranking since they play in a different league with the popular ones having far above 30M views.

The following ads are the top 10 commercials of 2008 on YouTube:

Please note: The last two are not really countable because they have built on an existing viral video meme and thus were removed from the count. Interestingly, the Visa ad that was a lot less subtle in the advertising message also received a lot less views than the Stide Gum, which is rather a sponsorship than an ad.

It is interesting to see that these ads have achieved quite a following in the short time that some of them have been around. Given a few years to catch up, the Gorilla ad, the Guitar Hero ad, or even the OLPC ad may well end up amongst the most popular ever.

The next lot of well performing commercials after these are in the 250K-500K range and are mostly Superbowl ads (e.g. Career Builder, Diet Pepsi Max, Bud Light Fire, Fedex Carrier Pidgeons, Audi R8 Godfather, Pepsi Justin Timberlake Fly, Bud Light Fly, Bud Light Cheese), just like many of the most popular ads are also superbowl ads (e.g. E*Trade Baby, Bridgestone Scream, Bud Light Will Ferrell, Careerbuilder Heart). There are also a few really badly performing superbowl ads, so advertising at superbowl is not sufficient for creating a popular ad. However, the superbowl certainly helps to reach a large number of viewers for those ads that are entertaining in the first place (this top 10 superbowl ads video summary achieved 1,167,754 views by itself).

Looking at the ads that Nielsen touted as the best-liked TV commercials of 2008, one has to wonder if most of Nielsen’s panel consists of children or caring parents, since they are mostly the cute ones with animals in them or other family-related stories. Checking back with the view numbers on YouTube for these videos, there is no overlap with the most viewed videos other than the Budweiser fire ad. The top popular ad according to Nielsen is the NFL story of Chester Pitts which only achieved a view count of 76,442.

So, in comparison to the top performing commercials, the big question is: what numbers make a commercial popualar and therefore a viral success?

Feed Company undertook a survey amongst agencies to find out what their expectations were for a viral campaign. Twenty-eight percent of respondents considered 1 million views successful; around 22 percent each would settle for 500,000, 250,000 or 100,000 views.

What does this all tell us?

The successful ones are easy to judge. If e.g. a video achieves more than 500K views in a short time, say 6 months, it can definitely be considered viral. This is for an ad that has basically a world-wide audience. According to the superbowl results, ads that achieve more than250K views within a year should still be considered viral successes.

In the 100K area, it becomes more complicated. Depending on the time frame, the size of the target audience, the language of the ad, the impact in sales created, and possibly other factors, such a view count can still be considered a viral success.

Lesson learnt: It is important to create an expectation for what is considered a success in terms of view count and in other metrics before starting a campaign, such as to be able to judge the success afterwards.