February 3 was Super Bowl Sunday—a day for competition among football players and the brands that dish out millions for coveted air time. According to social media analytics company Talkwalker, Pepsi inspired the most social media conversations among Super Bowl LIII advertisers with its bare-chested Maroon 5 performance and Spongebob tribute, while Avocados from Mexico and a new teaser for The Avengers: Endgame battled for hashtag supremacy.

Talkwalker measured 30 days of social media engagement for the Super Bowl and its advertisers, ending at midnight on February 2. Twitter served as the main source of conversation during this time, with over 8.7 million tweets—nearly 87 percent of all social media activity for the Super Bowl LIII.

For the previous 30 days, Super Bowl 2019 received over 10 million mentions and 60.8 million likes/shares on social media. This number peaked on January 20 and 21 after the Conference Championships and again on February 3 during the Super Bowl, itself.

The Top Five Hashtags About Super Bowl LIII Are:

  1. #SuperBowl: 1,600,000
  2. #SBLIII: 672,600
  3. #NFLPlayoffs: 411,000
  4. #SuperBowlLIII: 233,600
  5. #AvengersEndgame: 173,400

The New England Patriots emerged victorious on the field as well as on social media, although with a much smaller gap. The Patriots were mentioned 370,800 times (52 percent) versus the Los Angeles Rams with 341,500 mentions (48 percent).

Coca-Cola took a break from Super Bowl advertising for the first time since 2006, giving the upper hand to its century’s old rival, PepsiCo. While Coca-Cola aired a brief pre-game spot, Pepsi dominated the air space with two star-studded commercials and the half-time show.

This gave Pepsi the opportunity to shine with its “Pepsi is More than Okay” commercial featuring Cardi B, Steve Carrell and Lil John. The :60 TV spot complained about the common response to asking for soda: “Is Pepsi okay?” The brand’s #PepsiIsMoreThanOkay hashtag went on to garner 48,000 mentions on social media.

Pepsi was the most-talked-about brand during Super Bowl LIII with over 71,800 accumulated mentions which peaked after the halftime show. Not all of that attention was positive, however, as fans wanted to hear Maroon 5 play “Sweet Victory” in memory of SpongeBob’s recently-deceased creator.

Before January 2019, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi had an equal social media exposure. That all changed over the last 30 days, says Talkwalker. Thanks to its Super Bowl LIII involvement, Pepsi earned 596,700 mentions in North America versus Coke’s 155,900. In addition, Pepsi’s social engagement rose to 3.5 million shares and retweets, whereas Coke received 1.5 million.

Overall, brands that featured collaborations or mashups won the day in terms of social media engagement.

Doritos’ collaboration between Chance the Rapper and the Backstreet Boys (#NowItsHot) was shared over 57,300 times across social media.

Bud Light, meanwhile, partnered with HBO to promote the final season of Game of Thrones. A light-hearted “Dilly Dilly” spot quickly turned dark when a stranger entered the jousting arena. Bud Light garnered over 13,400 mentions for the period piece mashup.

Budweiser’s emotional “Wind never felt better” campaign has earned 17,800,000 views on Youtube so far.

Avocados from Mexico kept its #AvocadosFromMexico hashtag trending thanks to 96,000 mentions over the past 30 days.

The number one non-sports hashtag went to Marvel Studios with a teaser for The Avengers: Endgame with 173,000 mentions. When the official Avenger’s Twitter account posted the teaser video, it was retweeted 71,767 times and liked 145,957 times.