Boxoffice - March 2016

Super Bowl 50 saw the Denver Broncos ride their crushing defense
to the team’s third league title since 1998. The game was arguably
a snore fest, but the 63 commercials scattered throughout the broadcast
(some costing as much as $5 million per 30 seconds) provided much of
the entertainment value. As always there were winners and losers. We’ll
take a closer look at the six films that aired trailers during the game itself,
along with a brief look at the six films that went for the budget option
and aired their ads during the pregame show.
The effectiveness of airtime for commercials, especially on a major
stage like the Super Bowl, has mainly been determined by focus
groups, in-person or telephone polls, and ratings systems such as
Nielsen. The Web 2.0, however, with its rich social media platforms
like Twitter and Facebook, offers instantaneous feedback from the
commercials aired. There are caveats to consider before much of this
data can be put to use, so here is a quick cheat sheet:
Not all demographics are equally represented online. The sweet
spot for social media for films ranges from teens through 35, meaning
films appealing to very young or older audiences as their core
demographic tend to be underrepresented.
When it comes to Twitter tracking, the devil is in the search
details. If a movie title is unique (Finding Dory, for instance) then it
To get the best possible idea of the reception and effectiveness of the
Super Bowl trailers, we decided to look at three factors: Twitter tweets on
Super Bowl Sunday, Facebook likes increase from Saturday to Sunday, and
the 2016 USA Today ad meter poll (basically a huge focus group that votes
on which ad they liked best in real time). We then took an average of their
rank on all three to come up with the overall grade.
Pregame Trailers
There were six films that aired trailers during the pregame show:
Eddie the Eagle, Gods of Egypt, Alice through the Looking Glass, Captain
America: Civil War, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and Deadpool. To no
one’s surprise, Deadpool topped this list easily with 115,895 tweets on
Sunday and a net gain of just under 50K new likes. This is actually
the biggest Twitter Super Bowl daily tally we’ve ever seen, although a
few select others have seen bigger Facebook increases after the game
(including Ted 2 and Fifty Shades of Grey). It seems as though Fox
made the right choice in forgoing the bigger price tag for the game,
since it is the first time since 2010, when we started tracking Super
Bowl trailers, that a pregame spot led all films. In fairness to the other
films though, Deadpool was slated to open within a week of the big
game and had massive marketing spend that boosted its numbers
Deadpool
115,895 tweets
Captain America: Civil War
41,787 tweets
10 Cloverfield Lane
4,808 tweets
Gods of Egypt
1,365 tweets
Alice Through the Looking Glass
659 tweets
Eddie the Eagle
410 tweets
is very easy to search for all instances of “Finding Dory,” and we can
be largely confident that we have a very high percentage of relevant
tweets. When a film has a common name, however (The Lake or
Central Intelligence come to mind), the search strings used to ensure a
high percentage of relevant tweets have to be more restrictive. Other
qualifiers are required in these cases, and we end up with search
strings that look like “The Lake movie” or “Central Intelligence trailer.”
Our methodology at Boxoffice can sometimes include upward of
10 different strings for a single movie in order to ensure that false
positives are not included in our Twitter numbers.
Twitter/Facebook are not representative samples. So why are we
talking about them? The idea is that while they are not statistically
representative, by comparing movies with similar appeal, demographics,
and marketing, patterns will emerge that will help predict
demand, and indeed prospects, far in advance of release.
as well. The other strong showing in pregame was Captain America:
Civil War, which had over 41,787 tweets and 20,673 new likes. The
obvious comparison here is Captain America: The Winter Soldier,
which had a Super Bowl pregame spot back in 2014 and had 69,193
tweets and 16,899 new likes.
10 Cloverfield Lane had a very modest 4,808 tweets and 4,394 new
likes to lead the second tier of pregame trailer reactions. It’s an unusual
film to have been given a spot, so comparisons are sparse, although the
fact that last year The Divergent Series: Insurgent managed “only” 3,356
tweets and 5,049 new likes could be a strong sign. Gods of Egypt, Alice
through the Looking Glass, and Eddie the Eagle rang in with 1,365, 659,
and 410 tweets respectively. Eddie the Eagle occupied the bottom rung
for both Twitter tweets and Facebook likes with 410 tweets total (despite
a search-friendly string, “Eddie the Eagle”), and it failed to register
100 new likes between Saturday and Sunday. (continued on next page)
MARCH 2016 BoxOffice ® 25