BrandBowl2011 Pre-Game Site

Get your adjectives ready: Brilliant, Genius, Hysterical. Or if you prefer:  Lame, Boring, Derivative, WTF. BrandBowl is back. Time to think about Super Bowl TV ads. For even in the age of social media, conversation, user participation and engagement, we still like a good TV commercial. And what better time and place to watch them than during the annual advertising festival known as the Super Bowl? It’s the one day of the year when our friends and family join us, not just to consume :30 second messages, but to actually talk about them. That’s right, the ads. Whether they feature half clueless men, scantily clad women, talking babies, washed up celebrities or even squirrels (or were they cats?; please see video below).

So with that spirit your friends at Mullen bring you our third annual BrandBowl, an online social media party to which everyone’s invited. This year it’s bigger than ever. Radian6 is back. And Hulu is feeding us the actual commercials as they become available. We’ve brought on a new partner in Boston.com, the online version of The Boston Globe, to both host and help promote the event. This could make it a much bigger event than in past years.

Tweet to your heart’s content no matter where you are and add the hashtag #brandbowl. If you’re really into it, we invite you to upload your comments, predictions and condemnations in video form to the BrandBowl YouTube Channel.  Just tag them “brandbowl” and we’ll grab them to show on our BrandBowl channel. If they’re really good or funny or both, we might even import them to Boston.com, where we’ll have a video window to showcase the best of what we find online.

A quick refresher if you need it on how Brandbowl works:

• The stream appearing on Brandbowl2011.com displays tweets that are posted from the main site, or our new mobile version, along with any tweet that includes the hashtag #brandbowl. If you tweet from Brandbowl2011.com the site automatically includes the hashtag for you.

• The rankings represent an assessment of every Superbowl ad-related tweet, whether it included the hashtag or not. As long as a tweet mentions a brand that’s advertising on the game, or refers to its specific commercial, we can include it in our analysis, thanks to both a pre-game and in-game compilation of relevant keywords that we determine refer to the advertising.

Hope to see you there.  Go Steelers (for our colleagues at Mullen Pittsburgh) and Go Packers (for all our friends in Packer Nation!).  Most of all, go advertisers, please do some memorable spots this year.

The rankings below were captured during the period of 6:00 – 11:00 PM eastern time on Super Sunday (that was game time). The methodology we used to calculate the rankings is explained on the BrandBowl site. The rankings reflect both volume of chatter and relative sentiment (positive/negative) and are based on nearly 100,000 tweets captured from 66,000 Twitter accounts. We have analytical dashboard data for all the Super Bowl brands if any of you brand managers would like to see?

Here are the final BrandBowl standings 1-42 and above is a Hulu widget if you’d like to view the Super Bowl spots :

1. Doritos
2. Google
3. Focus on the Family
4. Snickers
5. Budweiser
6. Bud Light
7. Hyundai
8. Kia
9. GoDaddy
10. Coca-Cola
11. U.S. Census Bureau
12. E-Trade
13. Dockers
14. Audi
15. Vizio
16. Dodge
17. Dove
18. VW
19. Monster
20. McDonald’s
21. Intel
22. Denny’s
23. Boost
24. CareerBuilder
25. Bridgestone
26. TacoBell
27. TruTV
28. HomeAway
29. EA
30. Walt Disney
31. Dr. Pepper
32. KGB
33. Universal
34. Paramount
35. FloTV
36. Cars.com
37. Motorola
38. Diamond Foods – Pop Secret
39. Honda
40. Teleflora
41. Michelob Ultra
42. Budweiser Select55

Doritos - "Keep your hands off my Mama!"

Doritos, Google and Focus on the Family.

They were the three brands left standing on the podium at the conclusion of BrandBowl2010. Why you ask? Isn’t it obvious, I say? Simplicity. Buzz. And dialogue.

Of course, we all know pulling off effective campaigns is a lot harder than it looks. It’s much easier to be an armchair quarterback, to write blog posts about how successful brands follow simple marketing rules, and then state those rules for all to see.

Boy, this armchair sure is comfy.

1) Production dollars don’t help you stand out at the Super Bowl.

In fact, they might help you blend in.

How do you squeeze your message through the spectacle that is the Super Bowl? How do you break through all of the hype, through the blaring graphics, the laser shows, the celebrities, the boatloads of slickly produced, over-the-top spots?

You chill out.

Google reused their elegant “Parisian Love” spot from their Search Stories campaign. It was nothing more than a simple screencast of an enthralling dialogue-free story. You (yes, you!) can purchase a license for Snapz Pro for $69, get yourself some royalty-free music and in an hour produce something similar yourself. Gene Simmons—and his midget—can eat their hearts out.

2) Pre-game buzz is worth more than any thirty-second spot.

Set against a white seamless backdrop, Focus on the Family had Pam Tebow talk about her difficult pregnancy. Then her son, 2007 Heisman Trophy winning Tim Tebow, tackles her to the ground. Goofy smiles and heart-warming feelings ensue. Not a particularly memorable spot in and of itself.

But Focus on the Family got their $2.6-million-dollar-buy worth before Drew Brees brushed his teeth Sunday morning. According to the BrandBowl, Focus on Family was far and away the most tweeted about brand among Super Bowl advertisers in the days leading up to the big game. That the actual spot turned out to be something of a non-event didn’t matter.

3) Mix the first two rules, add a dash of dialogue with your consumers, and you’ll win the BrandBowl!

Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” campaign continued the brilliant crowdsourcing effort they’ve been running for three years now. It eschews top production values, in favor of building buzz and a community of avid followers in the months (and years, really) leading up to the game. It lets the people take control of the brand. The result is hilarious, simple, stand-out spots that get tweeted about in droves, make Doritos feel like a contemporary brand and makes them winners of the Brand Bowl.

Acknowledgment: this article was written with contributions from Andy Schneider.

Best spots on the Superbowl? Twitter will decide.

Let’s face it, if you’re in advertising you watch the Super Bowl primarily for the ads. In fact that’s why a lot of people watch the game. And what’s better than watching the ads?  That’s right. Talking about them. Playing armchair critic. Comparing your opinions to those of the millions of other eager ad analysts out there.  Well, if that’s your idea of a great Super Bowl experience, you’re in luck.

You may remember last year’s popular Trash Talk from Section Twitter. Well BrandBowl2010 takes it up a few notches with the help of our project partner Radian6.  Think Tweetchat on steroids.

Log on this Sunday (earlier in the week if you’re really a fanatic) and you can do all of the following:

• Tweet directly from the page so you can praise or criticize the ads

• Follow the tweets of everyone else who is using the hashtag #brandbowl

• View a composite ranking of the brands (not the individual ads) running on the game within minutes after they air

• Get a breakout of the volume of chatter as well as sentiment for each brand

• Explore word clouds to show you what people are saying

This should be a pretty robust experience, telling you what brands are getting the most buzz, what people are saying, and how they stack up against each other.  No need to wait for USA Today’s poll on Monday; we’ll have it in real time.  We’ll also have a full report here on Monday morning.

If you have a Twitter account, you’re all set.  Just go to the site, log in and you’re good to go.  If you don’t have an account, simply go to Twitter and sign up.  It’s easy.  Note you don’t have to have an account to enjoy Brandbowl2010 You won’t be able to tweet without an account, but you can still see the stream of conversation and access the analytics.

We hope you’ll join us and also feel free to pass this email on to, friends, family and followers.