Did you watch Sunday’s Super Bowl XLV for the game or the commercials? The Green Bay Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers in an exciting game, but much of today’s talk around the water cooler has been about the ads.

Ad Age rated all of the Super Bowl XLV commercials. Watch all the commercials at www.foxsports.com/ads.

Consumers used blogs and social media sites to discuss ads in real time. The hashtag #brandbowl was the top trending topic on Twitter during the game.

We used Social Radar to run analysis around all major brands that advertised during the game.

Commercial chatter within Super Bowl conversations

The words commercial, ad, advertisement or brand were mentioned in 13.5% of Super Bowl conversations online yesterday and today.

Brand Mentions within Super Bowl Commercial Chatter

Of the brands that advertised during the Super Bowl, Chrysler was mentioned most often. The word Chrysler appeared in 4.49% of Super Bowl advertising chatter. Eminem, the pitch man in the Chrysler ad, as well as the Brisk tea ad, appeared in 3.9% of Super Bowl advertising chatter.  Chrysler generated buzz with a raw depiction of Detroit in its ad, as well as the new tagline “Imported from Detroit.”

Groupon was 2nd most often discussed brand, mentioned in 2.82% of Super Bowl advertising chatter.

Groupon Sentiment Trend

Groupon Sentiment Feb 6-7

Groupon generated negative headlines following its controversial commercial “spoof” of celebrity-endorsed public service announcements. Online conversations around Groupon, which were nearly 90% positive during the month of January, spiked to 60% negative today following the commercial.

Groupon Conversation Topic Cloud

Nearly every topic of conversation around Groupon today has been negative. The word ‘offensive’ appears in more than 5% of all Groupon conversations today.

Regardless of whether the conversations are positive or negative, Groupon generated a lot of publicity thanks to their controversial ad. Is there really no such thing as bad press?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, you have probably been hearing about the ad battle between AT&T and Verizon that is paralleling a political campaign with constant attacking on both sides. It all started when Verizon decided to make a silly spin on iPhone “There’s an App for That” ads by making a “There’s a Map for That” ad, exploiting AT&T’s poor 3G network coverage. To fight back, AT&T decided to sue Verizon, leading to a war of attack ads back and forth that has no end in sight.

What does the consumer do in this situation? Sit back and watch in amusement? Take sides? One thing’s for certain – they’ve been talking, and Social Radar is showing us some interesting insight. Let’s take a look.

Now let’s take a look at the sentiment after the ad battle.

The sentiment appears to have effected AT&T the most severely, appearing to be a success for Verizon. But, both brands gained at least some negativity. Though this is good news for Verizon, let’s take a look at this from another perspective.

Below is a trend chart from September 1st, 2009 through today of Droid Mentions (blue line) versus Commercial/Ad Mentions (red line) within Verizon chatter.

What’s concerning here is that as soon as Verizon began to run these AT&T attack ads, chatter around their beloved Droid devices has dramatically decreased. We can see very clearly that consumers are losing focus and beginning to chat more about their commercials than the very ammunition they are using to sell against AT&T and the iPhone.

It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out. Are attack ads a good way to point out flaws of competitors or does it simply lose their consumers’ focus?