Both Cymfony and BuzzMetrics (Nielsen Online) have recently described offerings aimed at monitoring the attention around adverts aired during the Super Bowl (the final championship game for US American Football teams). Cymfony's product seems to be presented with a little more information at this time compared with Nielsen's press release though the products seem pretty comparable. Nielsen makes a little more of the real time nature of their offering (the timeliness of report delivery, or database loading, will more and more become a key distinguishing feature in this market). The Nielsen offering also mentions orthogonal measurements delivered from surveys that they intend to carry out before and after the game.
Carrying out social media analysis specifically around the advertising aired at the super bowl is, I suspect, more of a way to generate leads than it is to provide real in depth insights. Social media analysis does best (in general) when there is plenty of data and the amount of content that is generated discussing specific adverts is probably less than desirable for any real volumetric analysis.
[Note: it is a sign of how long I have been in the US that I don't find the idea of discussion about *adverts* to be weird. For some - I'm not making this up - the adverts are the reason to watch the game in the first place.Nielsen and Cymfony will do well if those individuals also happen to blog or publish in other social media forums.]
Check out the webinar I did reviewing Cymfony's analysis of last year's Super Bowl ads (registration required): http://www.cymfony.com/superbowl_recording_reg.asp
We found that great pre-game traditional media coverage appeared to drive higher levels of post-game social media discussion. This paper will be published in full in the next issue of the Journal of Advertising Research.
Posted by: Jim Nail | December 27, 2007 at 03:45 PM