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#BrandBowl – For Fourth Straight Year, Mullen Leverages Twitter, Radian6 to Rank the Best Super Bowl Ads [VIDEOS]

Super Bowl commercials have long been an American institution, but only recently have marketing agencies and companies alike been able to determine their reach and effect on potential consumers.

While many Bostonians will be much more interested in what happens on the field on Sunday night, those who are less interested in the game will have a chance to watch a different kind of battle take place, as Mullen and Radian6 are again teaming up with Boston.com to host BrandBowl 2012.

The concept of BrandBowl is simple: determine how well Super Bowl ads perform and are received by the audience by gauging sentiment on Twitter. Last year, over 300,000 tweets were accounted for, and some of the big winners were Chrysler, Doritos, Volkswagen and Pepsi Max. Cars.com, Hyundai and BMW came in last.

For more detail from last year’s BrandBowl, here’s BostInno’s complete roundup of 2011′s ads.

“Advertising is social, and given that Twitter’s active user base continues to grow and that armchair advertising critics are an expanding population in social media, we expect to get some outstanding data this year,” said Edward Boches, chief innovation officer at Mullen. “The most savvy brands are recognizing the power of social media and are releasing their commercials before the Super Bowl to build the buzz online, and orchestrating elaborate social media campaigns to maximize the impact of their multi-million dollar investments.”

The two Boston-based companies have teamed up on the event for a few years now, and will introduce a few new features this year that make BrandBowl more personalized than in years before. Some of those features include:

  • “Head-to-head” statistical breakdowns between brands (not sure how this will work for the joint Old Spice-Bounce spot)
  • A “featured tweet” section that highlights funny and insightful tweets from participants
  • Location and gender specific data about tweets
  • A streamlined Brand Bowl mobile experience so users can more easily see the live rankings and Tweet their votes

Even though participating is easy, anyone who tried to access Twitter during the waning minutes of the Patriots’ 23-20 win over Baltimore in the AFC Championship will probably express some reservations as to just how easy it will be to post anything to Twitter during the Super Bowl.

For those who can get their tweets out, participating in BrandBowl is simple. Just reference a specific commercial or tweet with the hashtag #brandbowl and your voice will be accounted for. Tweets as well as the commercials themselves will be livestreamed on Boston.com, allowing those who are really into the game to see what everyone’s saying about the ads.

Here’s a (slightly outdated, but still perfectly relevant) video on how BrandBowl works:

And here are some of 2011′s best ads, according to BrandBowl:

#1 Chrysler

#2 Doritos

#3 Volkswagen

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/2012/02/03/brandbowl-for-fourth-straight-year-mullen-leve...