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Twitter the micro-blogging service created by Evan Williams (Who by the way was also the founder of Blogger) is one of the best ideas on the internet these days. It is suppossed to be a micromessaging site that allows you to send an SMS Text Message (140 Characters max) to the people that are following you about “What you are doing at that moment…”

Now, it can also be used for other things and Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research is using Twitter on SuperBowl sunday to poll his followers about what are the best SuperBowl ads.

Great adaptation of this fantastic tool.

Let’s see how it goes and we hope to hear from Jeremiah how many people send their tweets on the SuperBowl ads.

These are Jeremiah’s instructions:

There’s just three steps:

1) Sign up: Get a twitter account, got that? Good.

2) Send your vote to @superbowlads: When we’re watching the game in real time, simply send a reply to superbowlads. I created this Twitter account just for this virtual event. Reply to the superbowlads account, name the commerical, and give it a rating of 1-5 stars, 5 being the best.

examples:

“@superbowlads That Pepsi commercial was funny 4 stars”

“@superbowlads The Hillary Clinton advertisement was bunko 2 stars”

“@superbowlads Bud-wise-er, that was so 10 years ago, weak. 1 star”

3) See what others rated: You can then see everyone who’s rated the ads by doing a search on any of the Twitter search tools, I like Terraminds. See this example, it’s showing all the people who have replied to superbowlads.

********** UPDATE – Feb.05.2008 **********

Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research, tabulated the data and came up with the following results:

Some insights from Josh Bernoff (Forrester Research) when reviewing these tweets:

• Coke scored two of the top three spots, FedEx got the other. The coke ads also scored high on USA Today’s Ad Meter, but not as high as here. The twitterati loved the positive messages in the Coke ads. FedEx’s silly pigeon got the other top spot. Both will “build the brand” but there’s no real call to action.
• Amazingly, the NFL’s own ad about the oboe playing Chester Pitts got a huge score. Apparently you like warm, uplifting stories. None of the other NFL ads even got enough tweets to score them.
• Salesgenie scored two of the bottom four spots. Many twitterati found these animated spots racist. I wonder if salesgenie will actually benefit from desperate salespeople who want the leads they are promising, or if the racist backlash will hurt them. That’s a nearly $5 million gamble. Amazingly, one Salesgenie ad scored an average of 0.78 on a scale of 1 to 5 — indicating the scoring range didn’t go low enough to account for viewers’ disdain. The lowest-scoring Bud Light ad, about immigrants picking up women, was also cited as racist by several.
• Claritin, Ford, and Sunsilk left people unmoved. These three ads, like Salesgenie’s scored not a single 4 or 5 rating, but only moved 9 or 11 people to rank them at all. In contrast to Salesgenie, the reaction was boredom, not a negative reaction. Why spend so much on an an avail and then create a lackluster spot?
• The commentary was interesting, revealed more than numbers. Jeremiah is onto something here.  I participated in Nielsen’s “Hey Nielsen” polling but couldn’t write free-form text. These twitter commenters, by contrast, told us that they would have been happier if Richard Simmons got run over (Bridgestone), that they forgot the name of the product in the dancing lizards commercial (it’s Ice Breakers), and that they enjoy seeing Justin Timberlake get hit in the crotch with a mailbox (Pepsi).

Obviously, a superbowl ad is like a Hail-Mary pass — it’s great if you connect, but costly if you don’t. And what’s the value of an ad like the Toyota Corolla badger ad, which got many positives but just as many negatives? I know all of you marketers have tested these ads to an infinite degree before spending all this money — but then why do so many of them leave people cold?

Do you think any were designed to provoke?

Finally, ask yourself this. Imagine that it is August 1, 6 months from now. Which of these ads will have made a positive impact on their company’s sales? How will you quantify that? And could you have made that impact more cheaply? How?

How Josh Bernoff did the analysis:

• Sorted comments alphabetically to identify brands.
• Where comments on multiple brands, created duplicates
• Where comments on multiple commercials, identified which one based on time stamp, comments
• Assigned a numerical value based on comment. Scores above 5 scored as 5. Negative scores scored as zero
• Put comments for each ad on a separate page
• Removed duplicate comments from same individual (except promos, which aired multiple times)
• Sorted from highest to lowest score
• Computed statistics for each ad
• Ads with less than 9 comments were put into miscellaneous category. This includes some promos, lots of local ads, and a few national ads.

Posted by Josh Bernoff