During the 2014 Super Bowl I gathered with friends for a relaxing evening of football, wings, and of course watching the new and expensive super bowl ads! Thoroughly under impressed with this year’s game as well as the ad’s the Esurance commercial which ran immediately after the Super Bowl ended was a breath of fresh air.

The ad featured actor John Krasinski telling viewer’s how Esurance saved 1.5 million dollars by running the ad after the game ended. In order to pass on the savings, Esurance will be sharing the $1.5 million (the 30% discount the company saved by running the ad after the game) with one lucky winner who enters the contents simply by tweeting with hash tag #EsuranceSave30. Krasinski will be reveling the winner of the $1.5 million dollars on Jimmy Kimmel Live this upcoming Wednesday after the contest’s 36 hour period runs out. Genius.

This is one of the simplest uses of a hash tag to drive social media engagement both online and offline. Why do I love this campaign so much? For the below five reasons:

1) Since this ad aired under 24 hours ago, it’s received more than 2.1 million tweets using the hash tag for the campaign #esurancesave30. Talk about some serious online buzz.

2) 200,000 of the tweets for the campaign came within the first minute of the ad airing. Some serious instantaneous ROI and Interest!

3) The campaign as of this morning has received over 1 billion impressions. Showing not only that the online world reacted immediately, but people shared, followed, and engaged hoping to be the big winner. (i’m equally guilty for my shameless tweet)..

4) The @esurance twitter account has received a massive bump in followers, since the commercial aired the account has increased its follower count by over 90,000! With thousands of Retweets & Favorites on each post the account has some serious engagement going on with it’s end users.

5) It’s a short, sweet, and effective campaign successfully tapping into the 61% of Super Bowl Viewers who share ads on
social media (Source:Mashable). It drove discussion online, and will most likely drive a bump in viewers tuning into Jimmy Kimmel this week as Krasinski announces the winner.

Wishing everyone good luck in claiming the $1.5 million, and a big vitual high five to @Esurance for an effective digital and social ad! Well done #EsuranceSave30