Brand Bowl was built to gauge public reaction to the brands advertising during the Super Bowl. By monitoring Twitter, we can measure people's opinions and rank the brands accordingly. The brand with the top "Brand Bowl score" on Sunday night will be the winner of Brand Bowl 2011, and is allowed to date the head cheerleader.
First we tally—using many, many selected keywords—the total number of tweets about a brand.
Second, we look at the opinions stated in those tweets to calculate a "net sentiment" score. The purpose of this score is to measure whether the overall public reaction to a brand is positive or negative. 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.
All three of these figures—the Brand Bowl score, the net sentiment score and the total number of tweets about the brand—are displayed alongside the appropriate brand on the scoreboard. You true marketing nerds (it's okay—you're among friends) can click on any brand for even more in-depth details. Hot diggity!
It is important to note that we are interested in measuring the public's initial reaction to the ads. So we use a narrow five-hour sliding window during which time we measure the Twitter stream. This prevents any pre-game (or post-game) hype from influencing the results. The final Brand Bowl rankings will be calculated right after the game.
Mullen, Radian6 and The Boston Globe partnered to put on Brand Bowl 2011. We hope you find it engaging and fun, and we welcome any feedback you might have. We also welcome gifts of beer or pickles. But we'll settle for feedback. Please post your comments at mullen.com.