Brand Bowl 2022: who had the best Super Bowl ad?

As another exciting football season comes to a close, one of the most highly contested seasons in brand advertising and consumer engagement is just heating up: Brand Bowl season! Each year before, during, and after the big game, top brands compete to dominate customer conversations among one of the largest audiences for any single event on the calendar.

The stakes for the Brand Bowl have never been higher, and not just because of the millions of customer eyeballs focused on every commercial break. Super Bowl ad rates increased this year to $7M for a 30-second spot — a leap of $1.5M over last year. Consumers have also been engaging with brand advertising across social channels well before kickoff, and that conversation continues for days after the final whistle.

To win in this environment, brands must be able to capture, synthesize, and act on huge amounts of data in the moment. Sprinklr Presentations provide real-time insights on dynamic dashboards, affording brands up-to-the-minute engagement across several dimensions simultaneously. Let’s take a look at who scored big this year.

Crowning a Brand Bowl champion

One aspect in the ongoing evolution of Brand Bowl strategy is the rise of the longer-term campaign, with certain brands utilizing the run up to the Super Bowl as much as the game itself. Through this lens, fans looking for a close contest in the battle of the brands were in for a bit of a disappointment this year. By tracking overall brand mentions in X, formerly X, formerly Twitter conversations through social listening over the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, the clear winner this year is Avocados from Mexico.

Taking the long view helped Avocados from Mexico capture and hold more sustained attention, but there are merits to grabbing the spotlight during the game itself. Among brands vying for in-the-moment greatness, Coinbase and their dancing QR code outpaced a crowded field that included Chevrolet, Flamin’ Hot brands, and — notably — Coinbase competitor FTX:

X, formerly Twitter mentions are an important metric for Brand Bowl success, especially as discussion across social channels gives many ads a prolonged life in customer conversations. But it’s certainly not the only relevant data point. Brands need to understand what’s working and what’s not working about their ads so they can replicate success and eliminate mistakes in the future. And brands like FTX looking to catch up to a competitor in the consumer zeitgeist also need a more nuanced understanding of ad sentiment for a clearer picture of where they truly stand in the Brand Bowl hierarchy.

Sprinklr insights allow for a deeper, more context-rich perspective on exactly what is happening with a top-mentioned brand like Coinbase:

The image above uses sentiment analysis to better understand what consumer feelings were driving mentions, what nonverbal cues customers use to express emotions related to the campaign, and what parts of the country were most engaged with Coinbase. From this information, it’s clear they made an impact with their interactive ad.

But, what was driving the sentiment? Did the interactive ad format drive positive or negative sentiment? What can other brands learn from the Coinbase approach? Without the ability to dive deeper into surface-level metrics like “mentions,” brands could not begin to engage with these questions, learn important lessons from the marketplace, or grow from their experiences.

For every campaign, real-time customer experience data allows brands to benchmark against their competition, gives them a richer context for consumer engagement, and offers a roadmap to action in real-time. One of the key lessons of the Brand Bowl is that any brand can be a champion with the right game plan and the right tools to execute.

It’s how you play the game

Just as every successful football season is the culmination of months of coordinated effort, and every play demands the harmony of 11 individual players acting in unison, the factors that impact the success of your ads is a complex and interconnected system of inputs.

When it comes to advertising during high-profile events, there are hundreds of variables to consider. Some of them — when and how long your campaign runs, which channels you invest in, what messages you send and stories you tell, your internal marketing ecosystem — are within your control. As we touched on previously, winning brands like Avocados from Mexico supplement their ads with things like new digital experiences and in-store features. Others, like Budweiser, adopt a “war room” mentality and the support of external partners.

But many elements of success (or failure) are beyond brand control. Things like a breaking news story, the teams involved, or even the score of the game can impact your brand in ways you simply can’t plan for. To mitigate these vagaries and keep your team in the driver’s seat of success, make these features a foundational part of your strategy:

Unified teams, data, and action

In a digital age when consumers are interacting with brands across dozens of social channels continuously and simultaneously, advertising during the big game is an ongoing process of engaging, measuring, and taking action where and how your customers expect.

With so many moving parts to every campaign and so many teams collaborating, you must ensure that everyone involved has instantaneous, shared access to uniform, real-time data. But you also need a single understanding of the customer that synthesizes every facet of sentiment: feelings, mentions, locations, and visual cues. And you don’t have time during a major event to pull this information from lots of different point solutions before it’s ready to act on.

With a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform, your teams have a single view of the field for every play. That means you can make in-game adjustments by engaging your customers directly on the channels they prefer with the messages they’re responding to, all in real-time.

Better context to measure success

As you’ve seen in Sprinklr’s Brand Bowl presentation, the individual performance of your own brand is only one part of understanding success and following up with the best next-step. Championship brands also excel at understanding the strategies of the competition.

A Unified-CXM platform gives brands a one-stop shop for competitive benchmarking, location-based insights, and consumer feelings across industries. That gives brands so much more insight into what’s working with overall ads throughout the event — not just what’s working with their own ads.

This helps brands understand with much greater nuance why, say, Coinbase is excelling in New Mexico but losing ground to Chevrolet in New Jersey. You can learn from the successes and mistakes of competitors in the moment with much richer data instead of waiting around for basic engagement metrics that are only refreshed periodically.

Visually compelling insight

It would be nice if everyone on your brand team was a data scientist, but the reality is that most of us need to process information in several different forms and from many different angles to fully understand what the data is telling us. When the game is on the line and the clock is ticking, that kind of analysis isn’t always possible.

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, it can be worth even more insights.

Great presentations bring data to life, illustrate relationships among pieces of information, and spark creative thinking in a way that spreadsheets and reports simply can’t. A series of compelling images also transmit that information in a fraction of the time, generating meaningful insight literally at a glance.

And while there are many point solutions for presentations, only presentations powered by a Unified-CXM platform integrate seamlessly with your existing consumer data to give you a dynamic, real-time view of customer experience. This means you can always visualize what’s happening now with the most accurate information. This is critical for making quick decisions or adjustments to strategy. With a unified approach, data and presentations are intertwined, so your insight is never obsolete by the time your team sees it.

Hoist the Brand Bowl trophy with Sprinklr

As the only Unified-CXM platform, Sprinklr is the best fit for brands with championship aspirations. Whether it’s a do-or-die moment in the fourth quarter or a part of your offseason strategy, you need a platform and a partner that generates the context-rich, visually compelling, and single-source insight you need to act.

Check out Sprinklr’s Brand Bowl real-time data visualization to see who came out on top in Sunday’s action. Learn more about Sprinklr Insights and reach out today to schedule a demo so your team is ready for the next big moment.