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Bain Media Lab + Hive: How Brands Competed for Attention in Super Bowl LIV

Super Bowl Sunday is more than a sporting event. Here are the highlights from next-day analysis of the commercials and sponsorships within TV advertising’s biggest event.

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.

Source: Mensio by Bain Media Lab and Hive
Source: Mensio by Bain Media Lab and Hive

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).

Attention to Duration Index measures the proportion of total program / commercial time that the viewer is in the room with eyes on screen.
Source: TVision in collaboration with Bain Media Lab and Hive; TVision Panel, 2019-20 NFL Season, P2+, Live and Same Day, NFL Game Broadcasts Only
Attention to Duration Index measures the proportion of total program / commercial time that the viewer is in the room with eyes on screen.
Source: TVision in collaboration with Bain Media Lab and Hive; TVision Panel, 2019-20 NFL Season, P2+, Live and Same Day, NFL Game Broadcasts Only

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.

Source: Mensio by Bain Media Lab and Hive
Source: Mensio by Bain Media Lab and Hive

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).

Source: Mensio by Bain Media Lab and Hive
Source: Mensio by Bain Media Lab and Hive

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.

Source: Mensio by Bain Media Lab and Hive
Source: Mensio by Bain Media Lab and Hive

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.

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Hive’s Presentation at Plug and Play’s Media & Advertising Innovation Summit

Dan Calpin, President of Hive Media, shares an overview of Hive and our media business at the 2019 Plug and Play Fall Innovation Summit in Sunnyvale, CA.

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Bain & Company introduces Bain Media Lab; Announces partnership with Hive and launch of Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform to analyze TV advertising and sponsorships

LOS ANGELES – April 30, 2019 – Bain & Company announced today the formation of Bain Media Lab, a business that will feature a portfolio of digital products and related services that combine breakthrough technologies with powerful datasets. Hive, a full-stack deep learning company based in San Francisco, will be the launch partner for Bain Media Lab.

Bain Media Lab is a new venture incubated in the Bain Innovation Exchange, a business unit that leverages Bain’s network of venture capitalists, startups, and tech leaders to help clients innovate through the ecosystem, as well as support Bain in creating new ventures.

“We are excited to introduce Bain Media Lab and to announce our partnership with Hive,” said Elizabeth Spaulding, the co-lead of Bain & Company’s Global Digital practice. “Today’s milestone launch exemplifies our strategy to deepen select Bain Innovation Exchange relationships through the formation of new businesses like Bain Media Lab, which will pair Bain’s expertise with best-in-class innovation to create disruptive solutions. It will also be a powerful vehicle to dramatically accelerate the visibility and growth of innovative technology companies like Hive.”

In partnership, Bain Media Lab and Hive have developed Mensio, an artificial intelligence-powered analytics platform focused on bringing “digital-like” measurement, intelligence, and attribution to traditional television advertising and sponsorships.

Mensio addresses a pain point shared by marketers and media companies – the lack of recent and granular data on the performance of traditional television advertising and sponsorships. As digital marketing has continued to grow its share of advertising dollars, marketers have become accustomed to seeing real-time campaign performance data with granular measurement of audience reach and outcomes. This dynamic has added pressure on television network owners to source comparable data to defend their share of marketers’ advertising budgets.

“Our partnership with Hive is the result of an extensive evaluation of the landscape and our resulting conviction that together we can uniquely create truly differentiated solutions,” said Dan Calpin, who leads Bain Media Lab. “Our launch product, Mensio, unlocks the speed and granularity of data for TV advertising and sponsorships that marketers have come to expect from their digital ad spend. Mensio arms marketers and their agencies to transition from post-mortem analysis of TV ad spend to real-time optimization, and gives network owners long-elusive data that can help them recast the narrative on advertising.”

“We are excited to partner with Bain & Company as the launch partner of Bain Media Lab,” said Kevin Guo, co-founder and CEO of Hive. “In jointly developing Mensio, we have blended the distinctive competencies of our two firms into a seamlessly integrated go-to-market offering. Hive’s ambition is to leverage artificial intelligence in practical applications to transform industries, and Mensio is our flagship product in the media space.”

Subscribers to the Mensio platform access a self-service, cloud-based dashboard that provides point-and-click reporting. Two tiers of the dashboard product are available: one for the buyers of TV advertising (marketers and their agencies) and one for the sellers (TV network owners). Selected features available in the Mensio dashboard and from related services include:

  1. Reach: Measurement of exposure to a brand’s TV advertisements for a given population, ranging from total population to specific behavior-defined segments like frequent guests at quick service restaurants
  2. Frequency: Reporting on the distribution of frequency for a given population (e.g., what percent of households were exposed to more than 20 TV ads for a given brand over the course of a month)
  3. Attribution: Evaluation of the impact of exposure to TV advertising and sponsorships on a broad set of outcomes, including online activity, store visitation, and purchases as well as qualitative brand metrics
  4. Competitive intelligence for brands: Insight into a brand’s relative share of voice versus peers, as well as the mix of networks, programs, genres, dayparts, and ad formats used by a given brand relative to its competitive set
  5. Competitive intelligence for TV network owners: Insights into trends in spending by industry vertical and brand, as well as relative share of a given TV network owner vs. competitors
  6. Sponsorship measurement and return on investment: Measurement of the volume, quality, and equivalent media value of sponsorship placements and earned media, with the ability to link to outcomes

The Mensio product suite uses Hive’s computer vision models – trained using data labeled by Hive’s distributed global workforce of over 1 million people – to enrich recorded television content with metadata including the identification of commercials and sponsorship placements as well as contextual elements like beach scenes. Second-by-second viewership of that content is derived using data from nearly 20 million U.S. households, inclusive of cable and satellite set-top boxes as well as Smart TVs, that is then scaled nationally and can be matched in a privacy-safe environment to a range of outcome behaviors. Outcome datasets enable household-level viewership of content to be matched to online activity (including search and website visits), retail store visits, and purchases (including retail purchases as well as several data sets specific to certain industries such as automotive and consumer packaged goods).

Mensio is currently in beta in the U.S. with a growing number of clients across industries. It will begin to expand into other geographies over the next year. For more information, visit: www.bainmedialab.com/mensio.

Bain & Company and Hive are additionally collaborating on other related products and services for television network owners addressing programming optimization and content tagging use cases.

Editor’s note: To arrange an interview with Mrs. Spaulding or Mr. Calpin, contact Dan Pinkney at dan.pinkney@bain.com or +1 646 562 8102. To arrange an interview with Mr. Guo, contact Kristy Yang at press@thehive.ai or +1 415 562 6943.

About Hive

Hive is a full-stack deep learning company based in San Francisco that focuses on solving visual intelligence challenges. Today, Hive works with many of the world’s biggest companies in media, retail, security, and autonomous driving in building best–in-class computer vision models. Through its flagship enterprise platform, Hive Media, the company is aiming to build the world’s largest database of structured media content. Hive has raised over $50M from a number of well-known venture investors and strategic partners, including General Catalyst, 8VC, and Founders Fund. For more information visit: www.thehive.ai. Follow us on Twitter @hive_ai.

About Bain & Company

Bain & Company is the management consulting firm that the world’s business leaders come to when they want results. Bain advises clients on private equity, mergers and acquisitions, operations excellence, consumer products and retail, marketing, digital transformation and strategy, technology, and advanced analytics, developing practical insights that clients act on and transferring skills that make change stick. The firm aligns its incentives with clients by linking its fees to their results. Bain clients have outperformed the stock market 4 to 1. Founded in 1973, Bain has 57 offices in 36 countries, and its deep expertise and client roster cross every industry and economic sector. For more information visit: www.bain.com. Follow us on Twitter @BainAlerts.

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One Shining Moment for Brands

We’ve reached the end of the road. 1-seed Virginia were crowned NCAA Champions with their overtime win against 3-seed Texas Tech. Hive wrapped up the tournament with analysis on the Final Four and NCAA Championship game. Here’s how March Madness played out for brands this year.

At a Glance:
  • Hive analyzed the NCAA Championship game to assess logo distribution by Brand Prominence*, earned media exposure, and viewership trends across games.
  • AT&T’s sponsored logos on digital overlays and during the halftime shows won the most screen time across all of March Madness.
  • Apparel sponsors placed their own March Madness bets by choosing which of the teams to sponsor as gear providers. Of the 64 teams, Nike backed 59% of them, followed by Under Armour with 25%, and Adidas with 16%. Under Armour’s sponsorship bets paid off by the championship as Texas Tech went head to head with Nike-backed Virginia.
  • The NCAA Championship game viewership fell slightly from last year but still reached nearly twice as many households as the Duke vs. Virginia Tech game (the highest viewed non-finals game in the tournament).

Another March Madness, another CBS ‘One Shining Moment’ montage. Texas Tech and Virginia beat out Michigan State and Auburn in the Final Four to face each other in the championship game. Both schools had never made it this far before in NCAA history and their game was the first time two first-time participants went head to head in 40 years. Hive used its best-in-class computer vision models in conjunction with viewership data (powered by 605, an independent TV data and analytics company) from more than 10M households to analyze brand logo distribution and viewership levels.

Brands

Figure 1. Results from the Hive Logo Model
Figure 1. Results from the Hive Logo Model

Hive recapped all the rounds and mapped out logo placements and earned media for all sponsors. AT&T remained consistent throughout the entire course of the tournament and scored 50% more airtime than Nike, who had the second highest amount of screen time.

Figure 2. Results from the Hive Logo Model
Figure 2. Results from the Hive Logo Model

One brand’s March Madness bets paid off big time this year. The tournament started with Nike sponsoring 40 teams followed by Under Armour with 17 and Adidas with 11. Adidas got the boot in the earlier rounds but Under Armour edged its way into the NCAA Championship game backing the Texas Tech Raiders as they went head to head with the Nike-backed Virginia Cavaliers. Under Armour went from sponsoring 25% of teams in the First Four to nearly 50% by the finals, earning them the same amount of screen time as competitor Nike. Figure 2 shows their fight from the beginning of the tournament to the very last game. These sponsors gave brackets a whole new meaning.

Games

Two defensive-minded teams faced each other in the championship this year. Texas Tech was unranked when their season started and soon found themselves in their first ever National Championship game. After being the first 1-seed to lose to a 16-seed in NCAA history last year, Virginia proved everyone wrong this year and also made their National Championship debut. The game itself got off to a slow start before we saw Virginia take a 10-point lead, fall to a 3-point deficit, then tie the game 68-68 to force overtime. Texas Tech fought hard, but at the end of the day, Virginia had the last say.

Figure 3. Viewership data powered by 605
Figure 3. Viewership data powered by 605

As the biggest night of the year for college basketball, the NCAA Championship game reached 12% of American households with a peak of 15% – almost double the amount of viewers than the Duke vs. Virginia Tech game, the highest performing non-finals game of the tournament.

Conclusion

March Madness is a huge opportunity for brands. We’ve learned which brands performed the best, what elements drove viewership, what aspects retained viewership. We also learned that you don’t need a Zion to go to the Final Four but it helps to have a star player to hike up viewership levels. Hive is the premier solution for brands looking to improve their real-time reach and ROI measurement for commercials, earned media, and sponsorships during events like March Madness.

Kevin Guo is Co-founder and CEO of Hive, a full-stack deep learning company based in San Francisco building an AI-powered dashboard for media analytics. For inquiries, please contact him at kevin.guo@thehive.ai.

Viewership data was powered by 605, an independent TV data and analytics company.

*A Brand Prominence Score is defined as the combination of a logo’s clarity, size, and location on-screen, in addition to the presence of other brands or objects on screen.