Game of Thrones, YouTube, Jozu for Women, Inc., SONY, and Twitch were the most talked about brands across SXSW, according to the Drumroll‘s innovative new tool “Brand Love Score.”
However, the brands that were able to take this chatter and ultimately convert it into positive brand messaging, making them the most loved brands overall, were IBM Systems, coming in at number one with an overall score of 47.67, WWE with an overall score of 47, Human Rights Foundation with an overall score of 44.8, Twitch with an overall score of 42 and Nickelodeon, with an overall score of 41.6. Twitch was the only most talked about brand in the top five to also secure a most loved brand score, according to the agency.
The idea launched when digital agency Drumroll noticed that , thousands of brands spend a lot of money, time and energy each year to create SXSW experiences and wanted to determine if it was worth the effort and cost.
The Austin-based agency created a new tool that measured the thousands of brand initiatives at the event, live, as it all played out.
By using this proprietary algorithm, “Brand Love Score,” monitored Twitter and listened to what people were saying at SXSW, then looked at the sentiment and impact of every tweet and assigned a value to each message. The values were processed for each brand to produce their Brand Love Score. The algorithm was built in-house and is based on the same core principles the agency uses in its client work.
Drumroll’s “Brand Love Score” also allows you to compare your favorite brands to see how they measured up with each other during SXSW.
DIVERGE talked to Drumroll’s Co-Founder and CEO Kirk Drummond to find out more:
Who is the team behind this?
Like most internal agency projects, the project team was made up of a great number of people. To list them all out would probably break the internet and to leave anyone out would be a crime. Let’s just say that the team behind the idea was Drumroll.
Why did Drumroll decided to launch this?
Each year so many brands spend a bunch of time, money, and energy trying to gain attention and affinity at SXSW. This year, we wanted to see if there was a way to quantify the impact of their experiences not in clicks or purchases, but in sentiment and love.
Why is it significant?
Most of the time you read about which brands were the most successful at SXSW, the determining metric used is volume of mentions. What we discovered was that while awareness is great, looking at it alone does not accurately capture the feelings within those mentions and the impact of the experience. Our system does.
What kind of response did you receive at SXSW?
We spoke with a number of people on the street at SXSW and talked to them about their experiences. We also explained our system, which was received enthusiastically. Because our system was monitoring throughout the event and only now do we have final results to share, it wasn’t intended to be an activation that was broadcast/received during the event.
How did you decide what brands to include?
Our goal was to include as many brands as possible. We started with a massive list of brands and then created a system that would allow us to flag and add new brands when they popped up (including their retroactive data).
How do you plan to continue your work around this?
Building brand love is what we do for our clients. For years now, we’ve been obsessed with finding the best ways to elicit the most genuine feelings of love between our clients and their customers/fans. The Brand Love Score is a nice way to share just a glimpse of what we already do for our clients with the outside world. More than likely, we’ll continue to build upon our tool and use it for future events.
How can it help others?
We hope that it shows marketers that there is more than one way to achieve positive sentiment. We want brands to see the tangible value of focusing on creating outstanding customer experiences and help them realize that while traditional tactics might be considered safe, they often times fall short of moving an audience towards brand love.
See their “Brand Love Score” face-off between Uber and Lyft below. Both brands were thrown into the conversation during SXSW, due to the facts that both ride services no longer run in Austin, so they wanted to know who came out on top!
