Month: February 2020

Hollywood’s biggest night, the Academy Awards, wrapped up this year’s awards season in style. Red carpet fashion started the night and Parasite stole headlines after the Korean-language film claimed four awards including Best Picture.

While awards are permanent markers of achievement, exposure is a broader prize shared by winners, nominees, performers, and presenters. Hive’s Celebrity Model, used by agencies to measure endorsement value and by media companies to enrich metadata in their video libraries, measured the screen time earned by the stars during the 2020 Oscars.

Bong Joon Ho – who took the stage as a winner four times for Parasite – earned the most time on screen during last night’s telecast of the Academy Awards, according to data from Hive’s Celebrity Model (see Figure 1). The remainder of the top 10 was made up of winners (Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt, Laura Dern), presenters (Steve Martin, Chris Rock, Kristin Wiig, Maya Rudolph), and some celebs wearing multiple hats (Elton John as a winner and performer; Taika Waititi as a winner and presenter).

Much was said leading up to the event about another host-less award show short on diversity. A diverse mix of presenters and performers aimed to compensate for nominees that skewed white and male. However, while these themes stole headlines leading up to the event and were scattered across acceptance speeches during the night, most of what was said during the show was relatively consistent year-over-year (see Figure 2).

Hive’s Speech-to-Text model, with commercial uses including transcription of audio and monitoring of brand mentions in TV, radio, and digital video, was used to track mentions and keywords from within the Oscars’ telecast. Insights from what was said across award presentations and acceptance speeches included:

• Thanks were given more than 120 times and love was expressed more than 55 times – mostly to thematic groups including The Academy, parents, partners, children, and God, as well as casts and crew
• Statements on diversity and inclusion – spanning gender, race, and sexual orientation – were sprinkled throughout the night and were material in aggregate
  • Women, plural, were referenced as a group more than 3 times as often as men, most notably differentiated by messages of strength and unity (“all women are superheroes”)
  • The presence of Black Panther and BlacKkKlansman in the 2019 Oscars drove more significant conversation on race during last year’s telecast, which was less in frequent this year although still referenced across multiple speeches (e.g., Matthew A. Cherry and Karin Rupert Toliver), award presentations (e.g., Chris Rock and Steve Martin), and performances (e.g., Janelle Monae)
• References to current events were scattered across the awards show, reflecting topics that impacted society over the past year including climate change and the environment, politics, and the death of Kobe Bryant
• For the second year in a row, Netflix earned the highest count of mentions by award recipients among media companies – even with just 2 of its 24 nominations resulting in wins

About our models:

Hive’s Celebrity Model is trained to identify more than 80,000 public figures in media content and uniquely leverages Hive’s distributed workforce of more than 1.5 million registered contributors to efficiently optimize the precision and recall of low confidence results. Commercial uses of the model include measurement of endorsement value by agencies and enrichment of metadata in media companies’ video libraries.

Hive’s Speech-to-Text Model parses and transcribes speech data from video and audio content, and can be accessed via an API or on device. The model is trained by tens of thousands of hours of paired audio and speech data. Commercial uses of the model include transcription of audio and monitoring of brand mentions in TV, radio, and digital video.

Kevin Guo is the cofounder and CEO of Hive and is based in San Francisco. Dan Calpin is President of Hive Media and a Senior Advisor with Bain & Company based in Los Angeles; he was a founding partner of Bain Media Lab. Laura Beaudin is a Bain partner in San Francisco and leads Bain’s Global Marketing Excellence practice. Andre James is a Bain partner in Los Angeles and leads Bain’s Global Media & Entertainment practice; he was a founding partner of Bain Media Lab.

At a Glance:

• Next-day insights using Mensio, an AI-powered TV advertising and sponsorship analytics platform developed in partnership between Bain & Company and Hive, highlights insights from the commercials and sponsorships within TV advertising’s biggest event.
• League and broadcast sponsors again captured significant time on screen, with 9 brands achieving more than 1 minute of total screen time outside of commercials.
• Analysis of engagement with Super Bowl ads, using data from TVision, shows 2.6X higher eyes-on-screen attention during ads in the Super Bowl than ads during the NFL regular season, and 2.0X higher eyes-on-screen attention with the game itself and the sponsorship placements visible within it.
• Commercial minutes were led by advertisers also present in last year’s game – 25 companies representing 52% of national airtime in this year’s Super Bowl. Increased share of voice came from consumer goods advertisers, whereas financial services & insurance companies opted for a smaller advertising presence during the game.
• Advertisers increased the share of commercials featuring celebrities and greater diversity.

Since winning their respective conference championships two weeks ago, the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs were heads down planning their schemes to achieve an on-field advantage in yesterday’s big game. For many months prior, brands and agencies were drawing up their own plays to break through on game day with memorable and viral creative.

What did we learn? For the second year, Bain Media Lab and Hive have partnered to analyze marketing within and around the Super Bowl using Mensio, an AI-powered TV advertising and sponsorship analytics platform developed in partnership between Bain and Hive.

The research relied on analysis of Mensio’s creative library, powered by metadata created using Hive’s proprietary computer vision models and Hive’s consensus-driven data labeling platform which leverages a distributed workforce of more than 1.5 million registered contributors.

Sponsors capture significant Super Bowl screen time

While Super Bowl ads may lead water cooler conversations this week, official league and broadcast sponsors achieved significant time on screen during yesterday’s Super Bowl through camera-visible signage, product placement and digital billboards in the telecast.
Using Hive’s proprietary logo detection model, trained to automatically detect exposure for more than 4,000 brands with more than 200 million individual pieces of human-labeled training data, Bain Media Lab measured the quantity and quality of logo placements within the TV broadcast of the game and halftime show.
While sponsorship placements don’t offer the sight-and-sound of traditional ad units, brands and their agencies are increasingly applying more quantitative rigor to understand the level and value of exposure that these activations deliver across platforms.
Consistent with last year’s Super Bowl, the 3 most exposed brands were Nike, Bose, and Pepsi. Nike, the NFL’s uniform and on-field apparel supplier, logged more than 45 minutes of cumulative Super Bowl screen time with swooshes visible on uniforms, cleats and other sideline apparel. Bose, the league’s official headset provider, and Pepsi, which again sponsored the game’s halftime show, each totaled more than 3 minutes of cumulative screen time (see Figure 1).
Among sponsors, Gatorade’s camera-visible exposure grew the most year-over-year, tallying 3 minutes and 12 seconds of exposure in Super Bowl LIV spread across bottles, cups, coolers and towels, surging from 1 minute and 20 seconds of time on screen during last year’s big game.
In total, eleven brands surpassed 30 seconds of cumulative brand exposure within the Super Bowl LIV telecast (not including the pre-game show and excluding league, team and network brands).
Among the top brands, Hard Rock, Amazon, and Pepsi achieved the highest average Brand Prominence Score, a proprietary measure of the size, clarity, centrality, and share of voice for a given exposure. Hard Rock, which holds stadium naming rights, earned its prominence through in-stadium signage whereas exposure for Amazon and Pepsi was highlighted by recurrent digital overlays on the telecast.

Brand Prominence Score is a proprietary metric that reflects the size, clarity and location on the screen, as well as the presence of other brands or objects, measured every second

…But Are People Really Watching? (Yes, They Really Are)

The reported price of a 30 second Super Bowl spot in this year’s game rose to as much as $5.6 million, powered by continued demand from advertisers. While Super Bowl advertisements are objectively differentiated in their ability to reach a uniquely large live audience, many marketers have also long contended that Super Bowl ads reach a more engaged audience. In collaboration with TVision, a company focused on measuring how viewers engage with television content, we confirmed this hypothesis applying computer vision technology to viewing behaviors during this NFL season and yesterday’s finale.

Compared to 2019 regular season NFL games, yesterday’s Super Bowl delivered a dramatically more engaged audience. The game itself delivered 2.0X more eyes-on-screen attention as a percentage of total viewership for the game itself, and the sponsorship exposure within it. Even more significant, commercials achieved 2.6X more eyes-on-screen attention than commercials during NFL regular season games (see Figure 2).

Our analysis highlighted two other interesting trends specific to this year’s Super Bowl commercials:

Dedicated Advertisers Lead an Evolving Mix

Super Bowl advertisements have become annual traditions for some companies – 22 advertisers representing 52% of national airtime in this year’s Super Bowl were also present during last year’s game, where they commanded 72% of national airtime. These included stalwarts like Anheuser-Busch, which led all advertisers in airtime in both Super Bowl LIII and Super Bowl LIV, this year spread across spots for Budweiser, Bud Light, and Michelob Ultra (see Figure 3).

Super Bowl LIV also brought its share of new advertisers, with 48% of airtime coming from 25 new advertisers not present during Super Bowl LIII. Some brands were returning to the Super Bowl, such as The Hershey Company, which bought its first Super Bowl ad since 2008 to amplify awareness for the newly rebranded Reese’s Take5 bar. For others, this year marked a first Super Bowl commercial, including Facebook which promoted Facebook Groups. Other newcomers, ahead of the upcoming 2020 election, were the campaigns for President Trump and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The net effect resulted in a different mix of advertisers than the regular season and playoffs. Notably, consumer goods companies claimed 33% of airtime in Super Bowl LIV, compared to just 8% during the entirety of this year’s NFL regular season and playoffs. The category’s Super Bowl presence was led by multiple spots from Anheuser-Busch, Proctor & Gamble, and PepsiCo. Financial services and insurance shrank from 17% of airtime in the rest of the season to only 7% of Super Bowl LIV airtime, a result of several top advertisers placing ads in the pregame show or taking the game off altogether (see Figure 4).

Advertisers Add Celebrities, Greater Diversity

What brands choose to say on TV’s largest stage is often reflective of trends and inflection points in our culture and society.

Sometimes, this is explicit – with Super Bowl ads introducing us to the cars we will be driving, the movies we will be watching, and the food and drinks we will be consuming in the years ahead. 40% of this year’s Super Bowl ads introduced new products, roughly constant year-over-year.

More nuanced is the study of trends in casting, based on analysis of creative metadata generated through a combination of Hive’s computer vision models as well as Hive’s consensus-driven data labeling platform which leverages a distributed workforce of more than 1.5 million registered contributors.

Cast analysis shows advertisers continuing to support the zeitgeist surrounding gender equality and diversity & inclusion. Women were present in 90% of spots this year, up from 74% last year. Similarly, 82% of spots this year included people from more diverse backgrounds compared 64% of spots last year (see Figure 5).

The most significant increase in casting this year was a surge in spots featuring actors and actresses, musicians, and other public figures, featured in 65% of Super Bowl LIV ads compared to just 36% of spots last year.

A resurgent NFL season is now complete. The bounce back in viewership versus the 2018 season yielded a sigh of relief for the league and its broadcast partners, and further validated the continued role of the NFL in the TV advertising landscape. However, the Super Bowl is not the only tentpole TV advertising event this month. Next Sunday, brands will be on stage again, this time targeting the premium audience watching The Oscars on ABC.

Dan Calpin is President of Hive Media and a Senior Advisor with Bain & Company based in Los Angeles; he was a founding partner of Bain Media Lab. Laura Beaudin is a Bain partner in San Francisco and leads Bain’s Global Marketing Excellence practice. Andre James is a Bain partner in Los Angeles and leads Bain’s Global Media & Entertainment practice; he was a founding partner of Bain Media Lab. Sharona Sankar-King is a partner with Bain & Company based in New York and a senior leader in Bain’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice.

Hive is an AI company specialized in computer vision and deep learning, focused on powering innovators across industries with practical AI solutions and data labeling. For more information, visit thehive.ai.

TVision is a TV performance metrics company focused on measuring how viewers engage with television content. For more information, visit www.tvisioninsights.com.

Note: Published Bain Media Lab research relies solely on third-party data sources and is independent of any data or input from clients of Bain & Company.