Universal Information Services

Yes, today is Super Bowl Sunday. By this time tomorrow who won the game today will be a distant memory. Ironically, the commercials during the game tonight cost more than any other commercials during the year. The pre-event marketing and public relations is greater for tonight’s game than any other event in the United States. Yet by the time the final whistle blows at the end of the game, and a winner is declared, our attention spans will quickly move on.

So with our limited attention spans, and the speed of the marketing cycle, it’s no wonder that the teams and advertisers all try to squeeze ever drop of value from their awareness campaigns. In advance of today’s game, our news monitoring and PR measurement teams wanted to analyze which of the football contenders were winning the share of voice battle in the media.

Typically, looking at media mentions, both traditional and social, helps an organization understand how much of the discussion they are capturing. The share of voice can be an indicator of success or failure, but must be evaluated within a comprehensive PR measurement model. Still, for the purpose of today’s game it is fun, if not scientific, to look at whether the New England Patriots or the Seattle Seahawks are getting more discussion among the media and social networks.

By this point in my post you should be thinking, “Well of course the New England Patriots will have a greater share of voice because they cheated to get into the Super Bowl by deflating their footballs”. I’m sorry, I should have said, “the crime that was allegedly perpetrated by a rogue ball boy running amok in the locker room…” or something like that. At any rate, we adjusted our searches in the U.S. media and social networks to try and control for mentions of “deflate gate”. Below is the result of our rudimentary analysis over the past seven days leading up to today’s Super Bowl. We’ve included the basic search strategy as well.

• “Seattle Seahawks” NOT (“deflated footballs” OR “deflate gate” OR “deflategate” OR “#deflategate”)

• “New England Patriots” NOT (“deflated footballs” OR “deflate gate” OR “deflategate” OR “#deflategate”)

Share of Media Mentions-Past Week

Based on the above graph, you can see the New England Patriots hold an almost 10 percentage point lead over the Seattle Seahawks for the Share of Voice in traditional and social media. Will that be an indicator of today’s Super Bowl winner? Maybe we’ll look at clusters of media exposure from the Boston area versus Seattle… maybe tomorrow.