Each year, companies spend millions of dollars to debut their snazziest new commercials during the Super Bowl. The next day, newspapers and advertising firms put together research polls on which commercials were the most liked, and which the most ignored.
None of that means a hill of beans if nobody goes looking for the product.
That's why we're taking a different view of the Super Bowl commercials at the Lycos 50. We've taken a look at which products and movies advertised on the Super Bowl saw searches rise the most in the week afterwards. We are also including CBS shows promoted during the game, except for Survivor.
The verdict shows that Budweiser truly knows how to stoke the Super Bowl fires -- but there are some other companies you might not expect. Here are the Top 10:
1) Swordfish (up 533.3%)
2) The Mummy Returns (up 404.3%)
3) Budweiser (up 238.9%)
4) Smirnoff Ice (up 140.0%)
5) Everybody Loves Raymond (up 74.5%)
6) Hannibal (up 63.9%)
7) Judging Amy (up 60.0%)
8) Hotjobs.com (up 58.9%)
9) George Foreman Grill (up 55.2%)
10) CSI (up 54.0%)
In addition, two movies which received no searches the week before the Super Bowl appeared on our search logs the week after being advertised: A Knight's Tale and Exit Wounds. (You can see the trailer for A Knight's Tale at Lycos TV.
Yes, the top two slots are movies (with the John Travolta vehicle Swordfish coming out of nowhere) but results made it pretty clear that Budweiser is the uncontested king of Super Bowl advertising. Their "Wassup" followup, "What are you doing?", continued their catchphrase dominance. While plenty of people searched for companies that advertised on the Super Bowl, only Budweiser had a significant number of people searching specifically for Budweiser commercials. The phrase what are you doing received as many searches last week as the phrase who let the dogs out.
Here are some other things we learned from this study:
GET TO KNOW ME: If you are changing your company's name, the Super Bowl is a good way to let people know. Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) was up 37.9 percent; Cingular, a merging of wireless phone companies including Cellular One, Bell South, and SBC, was up 43.6 percent.
IT'S ON CBS: If you want to promote network programming, get a Super Bowl. Three CBS shows made the top ten above, and every program promoted by CBS during the game saw searches rise at least 15 percent except for The District, Yes Dear, and strangely enough CBS News, which went down 32.4 percent last week.
BATTLE OF THE JOB SITES: Hotjobs.com, whose ad featured a travelling marble, was up 58.9 percent, while Monster.com, with two ads including a guy who seemed to be sniffing cocaine off his business card, went up only 9.2 percent. We're a bit biased, but we prefer Lycos Careers, which didn't advertise on the Super Bowl.
BATTLE OF THE CELEBRITIES: Pepsi's Bob Dole saw searches double, while Charles Schwab's Sarah Ferguson saw searches stay the same.
PERSONAL FAVORITES: We loved the E-Trade monkey-in-the-dot-com-graveyard ad, but it did nothing for their searches, which went up only 1.2 percent. And for the second straight year, EDS had a hit ad. Last year, it was the cat herders; this year, it was the running of the squirrels. EDS searches were up 36.6 percent, which means a few more people now know what the company does. My guess is, you aren't one of them, since their ads seem to have nothing to do with their services.
THE BIG LOSERS: Here are the products which actually saw searches drop despite Super Bowl advertising: Visa, Pizza Hut, Snickers, Levi's, Doritos, and the Chevy Cavalier, down a whopping 47.0 percent.
