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?

Inspired by Autoblog‘s monthly By the Numbers posts (such as this one), which detail automotive industry sales figures by brand for each month, we decided to build a list of the same brands, but looking instead at conversation volume, as we do in our Social Radar Top 50 Social Brands monthly posts. This list was built using the same methodology as our Top 50 list, but instead focusing purely on a list of 33 major automakers.

Ford has a solid lead here, which is not terribly surprising. As one of the world’s leading automakers for decades, Ford has emerged as the sole American automaker in position to survive without a government bailout. Ford has increased its emphasis on social media, with tactics like the Fiesta Movement campaign, an effort to generate buzz by giving 100 people Ford Fiestas and asking them to share their experiences online through blogs, tweets and Facebook updates leading up to its 2010 release. In addition, most of Ford’s online conversation revolves around the Ford brand, and much less in sub-brands such as Lincoln and Mercury. Brands like Chevrolet have to compete with themselves against similar sister brands such as Pontiac, and this hurts their rankings here.

Chrysler is up 5 places over last month, spurred largely by talks of its bankruptcy. We expect to see this continue throughout May, as their conversation over the last several days has surged well into first place. Also of note here is Pontiac, who moved up 10 places around talks of GM killing the brand.

Click to download the full PDF.

Rank	Chg	Brand
1		Ford
2		BMW
3		Toyota
4	(+5)	Chrysler
5	(-1)	VW
6	(+1)	Mercedes
7	(-1)	Chevrolet
8	(-3)	Audi
9	(-1)	Nissan
10	(+1)	Honda
11	(-1)	Porsche
12		Jeep
13	(+10)	Pontiac
14		Hyundai
15	(-2)	Mazda
16	(-1)	Volvo
17	(+1)	Kia
18	(-2)	Dodge
19		Subaru
20		Saturn
21	(-4)	Cadillac
22	(+3)	GMC
23	(-2)	Lexus
24	(-2)	Mini
25	(-1)	Acura
26	(+4)	Mitsubishi
27	(+1)	Hummer
28	(-2)	Saab
29		Buick
30	(-3)	Infiniti
31		Lincoln
32	(+1)	Suzuki
33	(-1)	Mercury

There are several polls going around about opinions on the hearings for government aid for the big three US automakers.  Autoblog mentioned in this post yesterday that CNN conducted a poll which said 61% of Americans oppose such aid.  They conducted their own poll, which at the time of this writing, had just over 11,000 participants, around 52% of which were in favor of aid.

 

I decided to run a similar poll using Social Radar’s Sentiment analysis tool to gauge support for this aid around the Web and got similar results, as depicted below:

Interestingly, the results were nearly identical with 54% in favor.  This is especially close if accounting for a few percentage points margin of error from either source.  Interesting stuff!

 

Looks like the country is very much split on this issue, as with many as of late.