Excedrin offers a cure for #DebateHeadache – and maybe Twitter’s, too?
Headache medicine Excedrin turned our collective lemons into lemonade Wednesday night during the third and final presidential debate.
Excedrin's #DebateHeadache resonated with American voters, generating 46,000 mentions during the final debate.
That’s because social media analytics firm Talkwalker, which says it uses 1500 servers to process posts from 150 million websites every 15 minutes to measure public sentiment on social, found Excedrin’s sponsored hashtag, #DebateHeadache, trended with approximately 46,000 mentions during the debate. (By way of comparison, #DebateNight was used more than 3.5 million times, according to Talkwalker’s figures.)
“While some used it as a way to express the difficulty of the decision, much repurposing focused on disagreement with candidates or general frustration with debates,” Talkwalker said, pointing to tweets about frustration and relief as two in particular that generated traction for the brand.
What’s more, Talkwalker said mentions of Excedrin increased 3100% versus the previous day and 360% versus the previous week.
“I think particularly among the social media community, a lot of people are really voicing their election frustrations. It was very clever of Excedrin,” said Talkwalker CEO Todd Grossman. “They were able to see people…might be frustrated themselves - ‘Oh my god, this is giving me such a headache – I have to take some Excedrin.’ It’s interesting times for us…[with the] least popular candidates that are running and their sentiment isn’t so high on social…[and] I think Excedrin won the debates with…Twitter.”
In addition, Grossman said the firm didn’t observe many other consumer brands using #DebateNight to newsjack, making Excedrin's effort “a great shot of adrenaline for Twitter," noting, “I think going forward, we’ll see more consumer brands being clever in this area.”