Lackluster Performance at the Super Bowl from Autos Sector Allows Entertainment and CPG Brands to Steal the Show in First Quarter of 2013

Unruly Announces Social Video Report: Q1 2013 .

Video technology company Unruly today announces its social video report for Q1 of 2013, which provides a look at the top trends in video advertising. This quarter has brought some unexpected surprises due to a stellar performance by CPG brand ad campaigns at the Super Bowl.

Unruly’s findings show that CPG ad campaigns attracted almost as many online video shares as movie, TV and videogame trailers during the first quarter of 2013.

All data in this report is supplied by Unruly Analytics™, a cloud-based dashboard that measures content from 1,300 brands across all verticals. In related news, Unruly today also announced the launch of its Analytics Dashboard (see companion release, Unruly Launches Analytics Dashboard; Enables Brands and Agencies To Outsmart the Competition With Real-Time Intelligence), a real-time analytics dashboard which allows advertisers to gauge the social impact of their current and previous social video strategies versus their competitors.

“Thanks to highly-successful campaigns such as Budweiser’s Brotherhood ad, the number of video ad shares across the social web for CPG campaigns increased by 78.2% during the first three months of the year,” said Ian Forrester, Head of Insight at Unruly. “The biggest surprise we saw in performance for this quarter is the auto sector, which finished fourth, behind technology.”

The Super Bowl, the perfect marriage of TV and online, is traditionally the main focus of autos manufacturers’ marketing budgets, but it didn’t seem to pay off for them this year calculated by the sector’s shares across the social web. In 2011, three of the top five most shared Super Bowl ads came from autos brands, in 2012 it was four. In both years, auto campaigns also took the top spots (VW and Chevrolet). However, in 2013, autos brands filled only two of the top five, while Budweiser provided the number one ad.

Entertainment Entertained Us in Q1

Entertainment was the most sociable vertical of Q1 2013, with 28.7% of all content shares (9,824,300). Two hugely successful trailers for one movie, the Fast & Furious 6, drove this.

CPG Landed the 2nd Spot

CPG was the second strongest performing vertical in Q1 2013, with 8,668,203 shares for the period;
Leading the charge for CPG was Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad, ‘Brotherhood’ – the second most shared Super Bowl ad of all time – and Pepsi’s ‘prankvertising’ masterclass ‘Test Drive’, in which an incognito NASCAR driver (Jeff Gordon) takes a supposedly ‘unsuspecting’ car salesman for the test drive of his life.

Tech Rocks The Third Spot

Tech was the third strongest performing vertical, with a share of shares of 17.0% (5,817,807 shares);
Interestingly, the best Tech videos – Three’s hugely successful ‘Dance Pony Dance’, Microsoft’s ‘Child of the Nineties’ and Google’s ‘How it Feels through Glass’ – each adopted different content approaches in their bid for social video success: there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to social video marketing in the Tech sector.

Auto’s Surprising Drop This Quarter

Autos enjoyed strong growth for the period quarter on quarter (+377.9%), achieving 3,209,008 shares, which is not surprising given auto manufacturers’ traditional focus on the Super Bowl, however, they still lagged behind other verticals in Q1;
After huge campaigns in 2011 (Volkswagen’s The Force) and 2012 (VW’s The Bark Side and Chevrolet’s collaboration with pop group OK Go in music video ‘Needing/Getting’), 2013 was not such a great year for auto brands at the Super Bowl.

To download a copy of the full white paper, please visit: www.unrulymedia.com/unruly-whitepapers

UNRULY and logos and associated marks are trademarks of Unruly Group. Other marks are owned by their respective owners.

About the Methodology

The data collected is from January 1, 2013 until March 31, 2013. Some of the data used in Unruly Analytics also powers the Unruly Viral Video Chart™, which has been trusted since 2006 by advertisers worldwide to track their video content. Many platforms don’t begin tracking content until users have identified the content and asked for it to be tracked by entering it into the database themselves. Unruly Analytics already tracks 1,300 global brands and counting.

About Unruly

Unruly is a video technology company that works with top brands and their agencies to predict the emotional impact of their videos and get them watched, tracked and shared across paid, owned and earned media. We use our proprietary technology to turn target audiences into engaged viewers and engaged viewers into customers and advocates. Brands use our social analytics dashboard to benchmark their content, outsmart the competition and demonstrate superior ROI.

In a nutshell, brands use Unruly to join the dots on Facebook, YouTube and the social web. The Unruly Viral Video Chart has tracked 329 billion video streams since 2006. With an engaged audience of 978 million consumers, across the full range of mobile, tablet and second screen devices, Unruly has delivered, tracked and audited 2.8 billion video views across 2,500+ social video campaigns for over 400 brands including Coca-Cola, T-Mobile, Volkswagen, Microsoft, Warner Brothers and adidas. We’ve worked with 60% of Interbrand’s Top 100 Best Global Brands and our mission is to deliver the most awesome social video advertising campaigns on the planet.

Founded in 2006, Unruly has 11 offices and employs over 125 people globally. In 2012, Unruly secured a $25 million Series A investment – the largest ever for a private company in the social video space. The company has won over 15 awards including “Best Content Distribution Service” at the Braves Awards; “Digital Innovator of the Year” at the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 and #14 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2012. To find out more visit www.unrulymedia.com