Forget the Super Bowl. Who Won the Twitter Bowl? - Page 2

Let's get a bit more granular with hashtags. The crowd on #superbowlads gave the highest marks to Pepsi's spots, with its MacGruber spot claiming the lion's share of users' attention (about 400 posts). The rival #superads09 camp also gave the thumbs-up to Pepsi (with about 450 posts). Coke (including the Coke Zero and Diet Coke brands) came in No. 2 with about 350 votes, er, posts, in each group, followed by Hulu (around 350 in each hashtag group.)

Yet the deeper one gets into Twitter, the more users' opinions deviate from the norm. Cash4Gold barely rated among the hashtag users on Twitter. But the term saw more than 1,500 mentions among all Twitter users -- right up there with Pepsi and Coke. Cash4Gold FTW LOLZ indeed!

GoDaddy, or NoDaddy?

The biggest loser, at least in terms of eliciting a positive brand impression, may have been GoDaddy.com, which spawned #nodaddy, which is more or less a protest hashtag against the company's. (Of course, if GoDaddy pulls off another record number of signups as a result of the ad, the joke's on us.)

Next in line for big loser on Twitter is CareerBuilder, thanks to an unexpected (by me, at least) backlash against koala-punching, as featured prominently in its "Tips" spot. (And yet, no #koalapunch ?)

Still, it was humble Denny's who may have pulled out the biggest upset, even after the final whistle, with "Denny's" becoming one of Twitter's most popular terms (inspired, it appears, from discussion of tomorrow's free breakfast offer.) Beating even "Steelers" -- you know, the team that won.

Is that actionable advertising impact? Hard to say -- but it's got to mean something. Right?

Well, not necessarily. I should point out that it's a widely held suspicion that "buzz" around your ads doesn't always equate to a lift in sales. In fact, some have said that the least-liked Super Bowl ads have actually performed the best.

Heck, GoDaddy.com has made a whole business based around that notion!

Since it, along with other dotcoms, enjoy something of a built-in direct response metric associated with their campaigns -- they have only to take a look at post-game conversions to see if they got their money's worth on a Super Bowl ad -- they presumably know perfectly well what they're doing... the Bob Garfields of the world be damned.