F. B. DOS SANTOS, J. OLIVEIRA
OPEN ACCESS SN
The expansion of these med ia has mad e it easier to find
friends, share ideas and opinions and information, i.e., a
democratization of content where everyone participates
in building a virtual community.
With the growing popularity of these platforms, com-
panies soon realized that a good way of advertising is
using social medi a as a way to connect people and their
products. There was a transformation of acting as con-
su mers and consequently how companies build their
marketing strategies [4].
So me works, such as [5], show that it is possible to in-
fer behavior of users throug h data exposed on social
networks and that includes, for example, consumer habits
and interests in general. This information enables the
ability to identify different groups of people and create
advertising strategies for different types of consumers
heating the dispute between companies and brands.
According to [6], market power is extremely difficult
to measure and the traditional models of competition
have man y limitations, s uch as limited flexibility due to
factors such as organizational restructuring, introduction
of new products in the market and even the appearance
of new forms of work organization, such as virtual teams.
In order to meas ur e the degree of influence of a brand or
product opinion and market polls are conducted. The first
aims to accurately detect trends and positions of the var-
ious social segments while the second focuses on disco-
vering market opportunities. Allied, they help companies
to generate knowledge about the place they should take
in their business.
On these matters, [7] show that traditional methods of
survey are slow and costly, since they depend on people
via phone or letter or in person to answer questions. It
also raises issues su ch as anonymity. As for the cost,
much of it is due to time collecting data that is usually
done over the phone or on the streets, requiring an inter-
mediary between question and interviewee. Moreover,
there is the problem of reliability in the data since the sur-
vey does not only depend on the number of people inter-
viewed, but the scientific represen tativeness of the sampl e.
Therefore, social media characterize a good source of
consumer reviews regarding products and brands. They
provide information about people allowing profiling of
age, geographic location, by product type, for example.
Or even look up from the point of view of a marketing
campaign if there was a good or bad response from con-
su mers to that product. Therefore, taking advantage of
the idea of [8] which states that the great advantage of
the internet is its power to prov ide immediate access to
information, it would be possible to obtain data quickly
and objectively, facilitating the analysis to be performed.
3. Case of Study
The Super Bowl is one of the most important sport
events around the world, garnering mor e than 111 mil-
lion viewers on the United States, the host country event,
and becoming the most watched television program in
the history of the country in 2012 [9]. Because of all this
visibility, it also has great marketing appeal since its
commercials are shown during the game with a very
large number of people watching compared to the pr ime
time audience [9]. When Super Bowl is on air a 30
second commercial costs in average 3 million dollars [9]
and it is known for launching new products, so capturing
data from the audience reaction creates a valuable tool to
the companies to measure metrics as return on invest-
ment and user engagement.
One way to analyze the impact of an event can be held
through analysis of social media data, since they allow
users to share experiences instantaneously via the Inter-
net. In order to plan the analysis, th is study used Super
Bowl XLVI as a backdrop and captured data from social
media like Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and GetGlue
which were able to show where these viewers were, what
they were thinking and what they did during the event.
Using all these kind of information, it was possible to
analyze the degree of attention th at companies and their
products attracted during the event.
Data from social med ia where obtained through a
crawler using the API provided by the mentioned media,
enabling the obtaining, among others, comments and
number of views. According to data from Twitter were
written more than 15 million tweets during the ga me
compared to the 3 million in 2011 [12] showing growth
of the platform. These tweets were originated from 46
different countries, showing the extent of the event. With
regard to commercials, it was observed that 75% compa-
nies that exhibited advertisements mad e use of social
media as a way to extend the brand concept and discus-
sions on the internet. Important tools to imp ro ve the idea
are based on the use of hash tags, fan pages on Facebook
and links to the video on YouTube.
In order to verify whether these strate gies have brought
so me response from the public, the final number of men-
tions of the brand during the event was verified, as well
as the growth on the number of followers on their Twitter
pages and “Like”s on Facebook. Table 1 shows the
growth of some of the followers companies that launched
advertisements during the Super Bowl, as well as tweets
mentioning the brand. Through these data, it is possible
to note that advertisements generated some kind of pub-
lic interest, since people start to receive in their Twitter
accounts updates about products and information that the
company think its relevant to users and custumers. The
fact that the companies are able to attract consumer’s
attention is of great importance since they are responsible
for spreading the brand related information through en-
dorsements and retweets from his followers.