Super Bowl Ads Get Users Googling

Whether you are an American Football fan or not, you cannot help but have seen coverage of this year's Super Bowl over the last couple of days. What is interesting about the Super Bowl, for even those with an antipathy towards televised sports, is that a huge amount of the buzz online these days is not about the game itself, but about the ads and entertainment, both TV spots and internet marketing, that surround it, and how they drive online behaviour.

According to a new post over at Searchenginewatch, the most searched term during the game was not either team, the New York Giants or the New England Patriots, but Madonna, who performed during the half time break. The actual term "half time show" was the second most popular search term during the game itself. During the game, just under half, 41 per cent, of people searching for Super Bowl related terms used their mobiles to do so, illustrating the now common behaviour in both the US and Europe of simultaneously multimedia multitasking.

Super Bowl commercials or teaser ads were watched an amazing 30 million times on YouTube before the game even began this weekend. Whilst the game was being played, the number of tweets per minute peaked at over 12k per second, the second highest number of all time, the first being Japanese anime movie Castle in the Sky, which exceeded 25k per second in December 2011. This just goes to show that even during the most exciting of events, the urge to jump online is now very hard to resist for many.