CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bluefin Labs, a technology company focused on the intersection of TV and social media, today introduced a system of metrics, Response Level and Response Share, to quantify and contextualize social media response to linear television. Bluefin Labs today also launched its first product offering, Bluefin Signals, as a tool for accessing, interpreting and analyzing this data.
The new set of metrics, Response Level and Response Share, enable the TV and advertising industries, for the first time, to measure and benchmark how audiences respond to television through conversations in public social media. Similar to established industry metrics for television viewership size and viewership share, these new metrics serve not only to measure individual shows, but also provide a basis for benchmarking TV programs across a variety of contexts, such as dayparts, genres and networks. The metrics are defined as the following:
- Response Level: A measurement of the number of commenters for any given episode of a show, based on a 10-point exponential scale.
- Response Share: The percentage of a program’s share of social response within a specific daypart.
“With the introduction of Response Level and Response Share, we can provide new insight into audience engagement in a way that has not been possible before. With these contextualized metrics in hand, media and marketing executives can interpret all responses to any particular show in aggregate,” said Deb Roy, co-founder and CEO of Bluefin Labs. “This insight, which can be accessed through Bluefin Signals, will help marketers and agencies assess TV shows and networks to better inform ad planning, buying and creative decisions.”
The calculation of Response Level and Response Share across the TV universe is enabled by the successful mapping of the TV Genome, that is, the comprehensive mapping of social media response back to its TV stimuli, which the company has achieved via its technology platform and cognitive science research efforts.
Bluefin Signals is a web-based analytics application that gives television networks, marketers and agencies the ability to explore and analyze the newly-available data and benchmarks. Beyond providing a view of the new metrics, Bluefin Signals serves as a comprehensive application for analyzing social media responses to over 3,000 distinct TV shows and 105,000 individual airings of those shows. In addition to show-level and network-level analysis, users of Bluefin Signals can also explore data on “cross-show engagement,” the analysis of audience affinity across the universe of TV shows.
“In a world of paid, owned and earned media, few tools exist that can collect social media response and at the scale that clients need,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, VivaKi. “Bluefin Labs is filling the measurement and data gap that has existed between television networks and advertisers. As marketers seek to connect social media to other media forms, Bluefin Labs provides an ideal solution.”
Currently, the Bluefin technology platform processes and analyzes over 3 billion public-facing social media comments each month. The platform also performs video fingerprinting of over 2 million minutes of linear TV each month, spanning 47 U.S. TV broadcast and cable networks. The company plans to achieve full coverage of all shows and commercials in the national market by early 2012.
About Bluefin Labs
Bluefin Labs is applying science and large scale computing to solve a problem that has eluded the TV industry for more than 60 years: how to close the audience feedback loop of TV mass media. Bluefin’s technology and data enable marketers and TV content producers, for the first time, to tap into data at scale that link people’s social media commentary to the shows and commercials they watch on TV. Grounded in 15 years of cognitive science and machine learning research at the MIT Media Lab, Bluefin Labs was founded by Deb Roy and Michael Fleischman in 2008 and is headquartered in Cambridge, MA. For more about Bluefin, visit www.bluefinlabs.com.