Brand Bowl2013

What is Brand Bowl?

Brand Bowl, an idea originally conceived by Mullen in partnership with Radian6, was built to analyze public reaction to advertisements during the Super Bowl. We worked with this team the last two years to deliver the Brand Bowl experience. This year, Boston.com has joined forces with Pointslocal to evaluate the massive amounts of chatter on Twitter to determine which brand performed best on one of the most anticipated advertising stages on the planet. Maybe the universe. Everybody is watching ... and everyone wants to talk about it. The brand with the top social score, based on the formula explained below, will be named the winner of Brand Bowl 2013.

How does it work?

First we ingest the total number of tweets about a brand based on a number of selected keywords. We are able to load the system with a number of keywords based on pre-released advertisements prior to kickoff. But then we will add on the fly, allowing for a wider scope to ensure as many tweets about a brand are calculated.

Second, we use a natural language processer to determine the opinion of the tweet (whether it's positive or negative). Yes, we even have a sarcasm filter. Whether the tweet is positive or negative will provide a "net sentiment score." The net sentiment score is defined by the formula:

(Positive tweets + Neutral tweets - Negative tweets)/ Total brand tweets.

Finally, to rank the brands, we calculate a "Brand Bowl score," in which we divide by the total tweets for all brands:

(Positive tweets + Neutral tweets - Negative tweets)/ Total tweets for all brands.

The scoreboard will update as close to real time as possible, and each brand has an expanded view to showcase additional analysis. The window for scanning tweets will open one hour prior to kickoff, and will run one hour after the game ends. This will prevent any pregame or postgame hype to influence the overall scores. Once the window closes, we will do a final calculation and then announce the overall winner, the most talked about, and most loved.

Note that the competition is for the overall brand, not individual commercials. Due to the vast number of tweets, splitting a brand into individual ad spots is nearly impossible. While one brand might have more commercials than others, it's the volume and sentiment that determines the winner. So sheer volume will not determine the overall winner.

Some additions to this year:

We have added a live blogging element, featuring commentary and analysis from Boston.com producers with links to content and videos as it's released. We are running a music edition of Brand Bowl in collaboration with RadioBDC and Billboard. Billboard has supplied a list of keywords on artists and musicians featured in Super Bowl advertisements. Boston.com and Pointslocal will track and analyze the social chatter and determine an overall winner in the first-ever music category of Brand Bowl. Billboard will use this analysis in coverage of the event.

The music category is also featuring a unique visualization provided by Infomous. Based on the same set of Billboard keywords, Infomous can display social chatter and connection in distinctive, active word clouds.

Thank you for your interest in Brand Bowl 2013, and we are honored to carry the torch this year. We hope you enjoy this unique experience.