Esurance stunt proves to be best non-Super Bowl ad

It's the biggest show on the planet. The Super Bowl. Say what you will about the quality of the game itself, everyone knows that people tune into the game for the commercials. Or do they? A company named Esurance may have just turned the logic of spending millions on a well-placed Super Bowl on its head with a stunt which will no doubt have marketers considering their options and dreaming up new campaigns in the same vein. What did Esurance do? They didn’t buy an ad during the Super Bowl. They bought the first ad spot after the Super Bowl - saving a whopping $1.5m. With those savings, they created a lottery of sorts. The company gave the money saved to one lucky person who tweeted the hashtag #ESuranceSave30 during the first 36 hours after the ad. Consider the statistics released by the company: • 5.4 million uses of the #EsuranceSave30 hashtag • More than 200,000 entries within the first minute of the Esurance commercial airing• 1.4 million hashtag uses in the first hour and 4.5 million in the first 24 hours• 2.6 billion social impressions on Twitter• 332,000 views of the Esurance commercial on YouTube• 261,000 new followers on the official Esurance Twitter account - an increase of nearly 3,000 percent• A 12x spike in visits to the Esurance website in the first hours of the sweepstakesThose numbers may make painful reading for some of this year's biggest spenders.