Bud Light’s “Keg” Tops Presaige Scores for all Super Bowl Spots

The Super Bowl is done, and the Monday-morning quarterbacking on which brand had the best commercials has spilled over into the rest of the post-Bowl week. Adding to the creative conversation is Presaige, the new AI-powered content prediction platform launched recently by Northern Lights Family, the parent company of the editorial house Northern Lights, the production company Bodega and other post production, audio and design studios. (We announced Presaige’s plan to score Super Bowl spots in a story last week.)

Presaige agreed to feed all the spots that aired during the network broadcast of the big game into its platform and share the scores with our readers. You can read the full rundown of scores in the table that appears below. The Presaige score is an overall read on how effective the spot will be with viewers, while the Readiness score is a qualitative assessment of what could be improved, based on the platform’s data points and model, in the finished piece before it’s released.

What better way to score Super Bowl spots than with a totally dispassionate set of AI eyeballs? The scores, as presented below, might surprise you. To get a deeper perspective on the process, we asked Mark Littman, Co-Founder and CEO to peel back the layers on the process. Here’s what he told us:

 Super Bowl commercials are, by their nature, unique and often norm-challenging. So, we weren’t really sure what to expect from the Presaige prediction engine. Our analysis did reveal some interesting points.

The Presaige algorithm was trained on a data set of almost 10 million images and videos. It works by finding hidden patterns and correlating them with real-life engagement. The patterns are largely undetectable by humans, so the scores are not always related to traditional measures of what’s “good.” For this analysis, we used two key values: the Presaige Score, which is an overall predictor of creative effectiveness, and the Readiness Score, which indicates how much better Presaige’s analysis says a given spot could be.

The Presaige algorithm liked the Bud Light “Keg” spot the most, both in terms of Presaige Score (7.7/10) and Readiness Score (9.9/10 – very little room for improvement). We’ve found that Presaige Scores above 7.0, with Readiness Scores above 8.0, are among the top you can achieve and have a strong correlation to audience engagement. This result did not shock us. In fact, we thought it made good sense that a brand with such a storied history of strong creative that resonates emotionally and is highly effective would have some of the patterns we evaluate somehow embedded in its DNA.

The next several highly ranked spots followed a similar pattern, with both high Presaige and Readiness Scores. Tree Hut’s “Uncontain Yourself” scored 7.4/7.9, while Pringles’ “Love at First Bite” and Wells Fargo’s “Celebrating Every Win” both exceeded 7.0 scores and had Readiness scores above 9.

Some other interesting data points: The Hellmann’s “Sweet Sandwich Time” (the Neil Diamond parody) got a slightly better-than-average Presaige Score of 6.1, while its Readiness score was 9.5. This indicates that the spot should get above average engagement, but is also about as good as that particular creative execution could be. The Blue Square Alliance Against Hate “Sticky Note” spot has a similar above-average Presaige Score of 6.8 but a 9.5 Readiness Score, indicating similarly that the particular creative execution could not have been much better. Another more extreme example is the Kinder Bueno “Yes Bueno” spot that rated an extremely high 9.5 Readiness, but a much more average 5.4 effectiveness.

 Although we were not quite sure what to expect going into this exercise for The Howler, we might have predicted that the scores for this set of spots skewed higher than average overall. On that prediction, we would have come out wrong. An analysis of all the spots showed a strong majority scored in the very average range of between 5.1 to 5.7, with only 14 percent exceeding 6.4, and only five percent scoring greater than 7.0.

Excellent creative often leads to the highest performing spots. But on a stage like this, it’s about more than that. When the work is a celebration of a brand, or just a celebration of tradition and humanity, it is hard to quantify and predict what actual performance will look like. So, this was a fun exercise, but the Presaige algorithm and tool is really more important the rest of the year.

Without further ado, here are Presaige's scores (in descending order) for every spot that aired during the big game.

To learn more about Presaige's content prediction platform, go to https://www.presaige.ai/.