Let’s face it the Super Bowl might be the only televised event in which people actually look forward to watching commercials. Last year, we measured:

• the number of times an advertiser was mentioned
• the “buzz”, during and after the 2011 Super Bowl

Later, we were asked did the amount of buzz the advertisements produced mention purchase intention and what were the commercials that people said was the best or their favorite? For the brands it was all about the elusive ROI factor. We listened to our clients and this year we went back to the drawing board and became smarter about how we were going approach our 2012 Super Bowl Ad Tracker.

Collective Intellect (CI) partnered with CNBC during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2011 to track how consumers were talking about retailers in social media. CI created an index that went beyond total volume and included weighted volumes for “engaged shoppers” and “active shoppers”, which proved to be more predictive sales during the holiday season compared to buzz.

For Super Bowl 2012, CI has again partnered with CNBC to create the “CNBC/CI Super Sunday Ad Tracker” which is a multi-dimensional Super Bowl ad tracker that goes beyond overall buzz and general sentiment scores to ranks each brand based on their percent share of several conversational indicators we call dimensions including:

Positive Conversational Dimensions

• affinity (more target positive mentions)
• favorite (“favorite” or “the best” mentions)
• purchase language (purchase-focused language)
• funny (ad’s humor factor)
• viewing intent (for pre Super Bowl buzz tracking)

Negative Conversational Dimensions

• unfavorable (negative ad mentions)
• offensive (captures controversial ad mentions)

Where other Super Bowl Ad Trackers score the advertisements using only traditional sentiment metrics of positive minus negative, Collective Intellect created the “Engaged Consumer” index that sums up all of the positive language dimensions minus the negative dimensions.  Additionally, Collective Intellect’s tracker tool allows brands to be compared against each other on the Brand Comparison tab so brands have visibility to how they did head-to-head with their direct competitors or in their category.  Brands can select the Verbatim tab to access direct verbatim from consumers about any of the brands included by each of the language dimensions.

Unlike years past, advertisers and their agencies have used  various social media outlet to leak previews and even the full-length versions of their Super Bowl ads this year.  Many of the ads have views on YouTube in the millions and have resulted in early reactions to the ads by consumers in the social media space.  To meet the needs of brands trying to track the early buzz the leaks have generated, the CNBC/CI Super Sunday Ad Tracker is already live and ranking advertisers even before the game kicks off.

Let’s see the stats and you decide who will win this Social Media Super Bowl Tracker showdown!