Harrisburg firm builds analytics tool with years of Super Bowl commercial polls 

An annual online poll asking for the public’s opinion on what the best ad was every Super Bowl used data from the past 19 years to predict eight of the ten commercials to hit the top ten. 

For 19 years, Harrisburg-based Pavone Marketing Group, has asked the question “Which ad won the big game” through its dedicated website, Spot Bowl. 

The independent marketing and research holding company created Spot Bowl as a way for it to be a part of the biggest day for advertising, said John Bassounas, a partner at Pavone and president of Pavone’s data and analytics company, WildFig Data. 

“We have people share their perspectives on the TV spots. We were the first online property to do that,” said Bassounas. 

Much has changed in the years that Pavone has held Spot Bowl– for example, many commercials are posted online well before the Super Bowl today, when Pavone previously had to digitize the ads themselves. 

What hasn’t changed is the importance of the event for TV spots. 

“An event like the Super Bowl brings people in who don’t watch much TV,” said Bassounas. “If you look at the categories, the use of animals, celebrities, humor—they all have to make an emotional connection with people.” 

This year’s Super Bowl marked the first year that WildFig and Pavone utilized their skills in predictive analytics and their years of polling data to predict what the outcome of the 2022 poll would be. 

To predict who would win the poll, Pavone’s data scientists created a predictive analytics tool using the company’s proprietary algorithm.  

“Because we have been doing it for so long, we had the historical data,” said Bassounas. “We understand what people vote on and what they gravitate towards.” 

The winner of this year’s Spot Bowl was Brothers, a spot by Toyota staring Winter Paralympic athlete Brian McKeever and his brother, Robin McKeever. WildFig and Pavone’s predictive analytics didn’t choose Brothers for the first spot but it did predict eight of the ten finalists in the poll. 

Analytics may not be able to replace human intuition in the workplace, but it can complement those perspectives, said Bassounas. He added that Pavone and WildFig intend to put the analytics tool used in this year’s Spot Bowl to work for clients. 

“You want to use the data to inform strategy and decision making and quantify the results of those efforts,” he said. “Creativity can be a subjective thing. The analytics lends objectivity to that.” 

WildFig’s analytics tools run a wide spectrum from prescriptive to predictive tools. Bassounas compared the tools to the tool Netflix uses to predict the shows its customers will want to watch next. 

Using Spot Bowl to highlight WildFig’s data analytics offerings granted the company an opportunity to show its work in action and it was something that the company’s analysts and data scientists were excited to showcase. 

WildFig was founded in 2017 and has since seen dramatic growth year after year, according to Bassounas. The company’s analytics work has also grown in sophistication over the years, something that Bassounas said happens naturally when clients see what data analytics can do for them. 

“If we are working with a client and doing descriptive analytics and looking at what they already have done, they may come back to us and ask us about predictive analytics,” he said. “More often than not, it takes a leader of an organization to say that ‘We need to drive more of a focus in the area of analytics and how we go to market.’” 

Chester County-based snack foods manufacturer, Herr Foods, is a client of WildFigs and is still in the early stages of its journey into using predictive analytics, according to Jim Herr, senior vice president of marketing and research and development at Herr. 

“To date, the biggest value has been having visibility to the efficiency of different digital marketing tools, promotional activity and combinations of those, then altering future investment,” said Herr. “Our sales and distribution model has so many compounding variables that sales performance by itself doesn’t always tell the whole story, so its important to have additional data that is accurate and actionable.”