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"The Super Bowl hasn't even been played yet, but there's already a clear winner: PepsiCo.\nDoritos, which is owned by PepsiCo unit Frito-Lay, is dominating social media conversations about the game's advertising, according to Alterian, a marketing technology and research firm. And sibling brand Pepsi has gotten the most positive buzz. The results are based on analysis of 73,751 online conversations from December 1 through February 1. \nAccording to the research, Doritos got the highest number of overall mentions with 4,161, edging out Best Buy, which bought considerable buzz by announcing last week that Justin Bieber would star in its Super Bowl ad, subsequently garnering 2,282 mentions.\n\n\n\n\nThe bad news for Doritos is that not all those mentions are positive \u2014 about 12.2% were negative, which is relatively high, says Scott Briggs, director of strategic solutions for Alterian. On the bright side for PepsiCo, Doritos sibling brand Pepsi, whose Pepsi Max sub-brand will be advertising during the game, had the highest positive sentiment of brands surveyed, at 16.4%.\n\n\n\n\nPepsiCo's dominance in the rankings is no doubt a reflection of its Crash the Super Bowl contest. Now in its fifth year, the promotion asks consumers to make ads for Frito-Lay's brands and offers cash prizes to the winners, plus exposure during the game. \nPepsiCo announced this year's program on September 15, 2010 and various stages of the contest keep the buzz going. From September 27 through November 15, contestants could load videos onto a dedicated website. From then on, consumers could view the ads. In early January, after a panel of judges from Pepsi and Frito-Lay narrowed the semifinalists to 10, consumers were invited to pick four winners from the pack. \nThe company's strategy ensured that there would be a lot to discuss, but the approach wasn't without its risks \u2014 especially of offending people. One of the consumer-loaded ads, for instance, wound up offending Catholics for its implied use of Doritos and Pepsi Max in place of the Holy Communion. And  two other consumer-created ads, as well as one that made the final 10, contained gay themes that caused some to question the portrayal of gays in ads. \nAll that got people talking about Doritos. The brand scored highest in Alterian's Social Engagement Index, which measures the value and reach of social media conversations. Doritos' score shows when it came to social media conversations, the brand had 4.5 times the average reach of a Super Bowl advertiser.\nAgain, however, Alterian found that a lot of those conversations were negative. The company discovered that Pepsi's good buzz was the mirror image of the brand bashing related to Doritos. \nFinally, despite Facebook's popularity and huge consumer base, most conversations about the brands were happening on microblogs like Twitter. Social networks, including Facebook, made up just 11.7% of results. Briggs says not to read too much into those stats, however, since Alterian could only draw results from public Facebook pages (i.e. fan pages) and couldn't get a sense of how much people were mentioning brands on their personal pages.\n\n\n\n\nBriggs also cautions that Super Bowl advertiser sentiment varies wildly before and after the game. For instance, the brand that had the most buzz after the 2010 Super Bowl was Google, whose \"Parisian Love\" Super Bowl ad was a complete surprise to most viewers. A similar shift in sentiment might happen after this weekend. \"I would expect after Sunday the results will be completely different,\" says Briggs."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/02/04/pepsico-super-bowl-buzz/>