Doubting the power of a Sweepstakes to drive traffic?
Look no further than the results from last night’s Esurance post-Super Bowl advertisement. Esurance used the first ad after the Super Bowl to promote their #esurancesave30 hashtag. And while many other Super Bowl ads touted a hashtag, none of them also put a Sweepstakes behind it.
Did the Sweepstakes angle work?
The answer to that is a resounding yes.
Why?
Because esurance used their ad to plug a Sweepstakes where the winner will receive $1.5 million and people love to win cash!
Instant buzz.
As of noon today #esurancesave30 is the still the second trending topic on Twitter. Only #superbowl is trending higher – and for a short time overnight it was #1 above #superbowl. And only one of the other trending hashtags in the top 10 is from an ad during the big game – #hugfest from the Honda commercial with Bruce Willis – which trended for only an hour. Other than that – no ad buzz on Twitter.
We used our Marden-Kane Twitter feed monitor this morning to look at the number of public entries and estimate it to be around 42,000 public entries — and there are probably exponentially more entrants that are followers of Esurance that we can’t track.
You see in order for your entry to count, and for Esurance to direct message a winner, you must be a follower and allow the brand to see your tweets (see the rules here). This means that the public feed only displays what we estimate to be a small proportion of the entries. Actual entries will be much higher – and a total boon for esurance which now boasts more followers (178,000 last time we looked).
And then there is the buzz from people that didn’t even enter. #Esurance, or simply esurance with no hashtag, also trended with exasperated tweets from people tired of seeing their feed flooded with #Esurancesave30 tweets.
Results: A huge brand win in terms of brand awareness, new followers and return on Super Bowl ad investment.
UPDATE 2/6/14: According to Nielsen, 2.4 million Twitter users posted 4.9 million tweets about Super Bowl ads, with Esurance enjoying the highest amount of unique authors (1.2 million) and tweets (almost 1.9 million). Following Esurance were Budweiser (393,700 tweets) and T-Mobile (303,200 tweets). And Ad Age reports that Esurance gained 255,430 new followers, an follower increase of 2,311%. Clearly, Esurance was the Twitter ad winner.
Next time you want to make a buzz, remember that a Sweepstakes can take your ad from “cute” or “memorable” to “buzz-worthy.” Marden-Kane can help you with the legalities and logistics, including use of our Marden-Kane Twitter feed monitor for tracking entries and selecting winners. Contact us and we can help get you started.
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