How America Experienced the Super Bowl — As Told by GIFs
Last night was the biggest football and advertising event of the year. Today, everyone is assessing which commercial was best or analyzing the gameplay from the Chiefs vs 49ers showdown. Not to mention all the chatter about Taylor Swift.
But how did fans and viewers alike really feel about the game, the half-time show, and Taylor’s presence?
We took a look at the search behavior across GIPHY’s platform to find out. With our massive user reach and the fact that people come to GIPHY to find the perfect piece of content to express themselves, we have a unique insight into what aspects of an event truly resonated with its audience.
Here’s what we found:
Overall, the Halftime Show Ruled the Day
The hour in which the halftime show occurred was the highest volume of trending searches for the night, accounting for more than a quarter of top search volume during the five hour observed period. Highlights from the show include:
- “Lil Jon” was by far the most popular search of the show by volume. His search volume skyrocketed by more than 10010% hour over hour following his guest appearance at the halftime show.
- “My Boo” led the way as far as the performed song with the highest spike in searches, jumping 1558% in volume.
- Speaking of “My Boo”… “Swizz beatz”, “swizz” and “swiss” jumped in volume, most likely as a reaction to Usher and Alicia Keys getting pretty.. close during their performance of the song.
In addition, while it wasn’t her halftime show this year, Beyoncé still had her moment. The announcement of her new album via the Verizon commercial led to a 295.9% jump in volume for “Beyoncé” searches showing that — on the stage that is the Internet — you don’t have to be the main act to still get the spotlight.
To the Victor, Go the S̶p̶o̶i̶l̶s̶ Searches
If GIPHY searches were part of the Super Bowl, then the Kansas City Chiefs won more than just the game. Search volume for the Chiefs was almost 2x that of searches for the 49ers. For the most part, we found that user search behavior often paralleled how each team was doing points-wise. Some insights below:
- Searches for the Chiefs didn’t really take off until later in the game. In fact, the last two hours of the game accounted for 75.1% of their top trending searches during the five hours observed.
- The only hour in which 49ers volume outpaced the Chiefs was during the second hour, which coincides with the 49ers taking a lead with the Jauan Jennings touchdown throw to Christian McCaffrey.
- As far as trending players, Christian McCaffrey, Deebo Samuel, George Kittle and Jake Moody led the way for the 49ers. For the Chiefs, Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes unsurprisingly took the lead!
- Bonus stat: people loved Travis Kelce’s rendition of “Viva Las Vegas,” which prompted that query to jump 3552% during the postgame celebrations.
Let’s Talk About Taylor
How could we not? Fans were eager with anticipation as to whether Taylor would jetset from Tokyo to make it in time for the Super Bowl so naturally we had to see if her presence had an impact on user behavior.
While searches for Taylor certainly spiked, moments like the halftime show and football-related content still significantly outperformed any search volume for our girl Taylor.
That being said, interestingly, searches for Taylor often corresponded with how the Chiefs were playing. For example:
- When the Chiefs were behind earlier in the game we saw spikes for “Taylor Swift crying” and “you need to calm down Taylor Swift.”
- However, once the Chiefs caught up and eventually won, overall searches for Taylor grew 277.6% and represented the highest hourly search volume for Taylor-related queries.
