Luckily for Mullen, the 1999 Monster.com spot When I Grow Up is still in the mix. Thanks Teressa and Fast Co. for recognizing this gem from Mullen’s past.

We’re hoping that some enterprising reporter will track down the kids who were cast in this spot and see how their careers are going.  Hopefully they’re all gainfully employed in inspiring jobs with dynamic companies or at least doing something to save the world.

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

BrandBowl2010 Winners

According to the 63,000+ Twitter users whose comments were captured in BrandBowl2010, Doritos was the most effective brand to advertise on the Super Bowl telecast on CBS this year. Budweiser Select55 was the least effective brand.

Mullen, and Radian6, a leader in social media measurement, created BrandBowl2010, a Twitter/Super Bowl experience that combined tweeting, ad reviews and a host of metrics to let viewers generate and view real time ratings of the TV commercials that ran on the big game.

The results were determined from a total of 98,656 Tweets collected at BrandBowl2010. The site provided an overall ranking of the brands advertising on the game based on a composite score that takes into consideration both volume of tweets and sentiment (positive or negative).

TOP SCORERS
When all was said and done, the top three brands were Doritos, Google and Focus on the Family. Doritos won the title by virtue of dominating the sheer volume of tweets. That was enough to keep them ahead of Google, which had a higher percentage of positive tweets.

MOST POPULAR
The most popular brands at the BrandBowl were McDonald’s and Dr. Pepper. Interestingly, neither of these brands had the sheer number of tweets to break into BrandBowl’s top ten—but the tweets about these brands were overwhelmingly positive.

MOST VOLUME
Again, the top three brands were Doritos, Google and Focus on the Family. These brands gapped the rest of the field in terms of volume of tweets, which dropped off sharply after the top three.

Free creative for Budweiser Select55

Mullen is offering Budweiser Select55, the last place finisher in BrandBowl2010, free creative services to make a better Super Bowl commercial next year. Mullen has produced four Super Bowl commercials in the past, including the Monster.com spot When I Grow Up, which many ad critics consider among the best Super Bowl spots of all time.

“Clearly no one wants to come in last place,” said Edward Boches, chief creative officer at Mullen. “So to ease the pain, we’ve made a commitment to recommend, for free, to the losing brand, creative ideas for next year. Perhaps we’ll even crowdsource those ideas, asking the entire social media community to join us in offering up free recommendations.”

The Top Ten Most Effective Brands on BrandBowl2010

1. Doritos
2. Google
3. Focus On Family
4. Snickers:
5. Budweiser
6. Bud Light
7. Hyundai
8. Kia
9. GoDaddy
10. Coca-Cola

The Five Least Effective Brands on BrandBowl2010

1. Budweiser Select55
2. Michelob Ultra
3. Teleflora
4. Honda
5. Diamond Foods’ – Pop Secret

The success of Brandbowl is due not only to all the people at Mullen and Radian6 who built it, but to many people in the social media community who helped promote it: @bbhlabs, @bigspaceship, @rga, @erproulx, @benkunz, @schwartzie14, @stevehall,  @kenwheaton, @lvanderpool and dozens of others.  That alone is a reminder of the worth of having a social network and a community.