Digital Trends:

The slow pace of brands releasing teasers in 2017 may be a reason we see a lag for a few key online metrics. Most noticeably, earned YouTube views are back to levels more aligned with 2014 when brands tended to wait until later in the week to release creatives, if at all.

Social actions are up year over year, in part because brands are getting more savvy about utilizing celebrity profiles, for example Wix.com is leading the pack right now thanks to Jason Statham & Gal Gadot uploading creatives directly to their FB pages and likely boosting from there.

Political Influences: You’ve probably seen the Audi Equality ad and the Budweiser Immigration ad that are catching some early fire; and Avocados from Mexico’s Illuminati-themed spot is generating a ton of views online.

Humpty is Sticky on TV screens: TurboTax is leveraging the Humpty ad on TV. Measuring attention from 10 million TV screens, iSpot.tv reports a completion rate of 97.7% on 401 airings. That’s about as sticky as they come.

Skittles is being skillful about branded content on ESPN and Complex leveraged it for 3 million FB views.

New Flood of Creatives: Heading into yesterday, 2017 Super Bowl advertisers were slow to drop creatives compared to previous years when brands deployed a strategy of launching creatives early and often. See an  analysis on that here.

Whereas last year (2016) the pace of new creatives slowed the Wednesday before the Super Bowl-- yesterday was a day for 2017 SB advertisers to get the new teasers out and catch up...

There were 16 new creatives and 12 brands entering the ring with something fresh yesterday... now a total of 33 brands have teasers out (compared to 39 this time last year) and 63 are in circulation, almost on par with the 67 a year ago.

New Entrants Include: Bud Light’s ‘Ghost Spuds’, Tide’s ‘Gronk Sorta Gets It Out’, Wonderful Pistachios’ ‘Ernie Gets Physical’, and Sprint’s ‘No Need for Extreme Measures’

Mega Hits Are Still in the Making

2016: Pokemon 20 Had 13 million views already at this time last year, and to go with it, 505,282 explicit social actions. (almost half the action).  2015:  Always’ #Likeagirl campaign had 6.7 million earned views and 566k social actions heading into Weds morning before the game. (more than 50% of the total). This year Wix is showing up strong with 22% of social actions, but the winners in previous years were late sprinters (2015 Bud’s Lost Dog  dropped late on Tuesday and ended up owning the internet with 3.7 million social actions. Likewise, last year Pokemon was caught by a stampede of weiner dogs and by the time the game was over PuppyMonkeyBaby, the esurance Pass It On Sweepstakes and Drake’s T-Mobile Restricted Bling all came away with huge numbers.