It’s got singing and dancing, winning and losing, multiple languages. It’s politics, sports, entertainment all rolled into one.

The Super Bowl, the championship of the National Football League, is one of the highest concentrations of attention throughout the year in terms of sheer attention tonnage.

This makes it a yearly Mecca for advertising, but not without chaos. Perhaps no event better embodies what Overtone calls the flood of content. It is colourful, loud, omnichannel, concentrated and dispersed, the event itself and the backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun. It can feel overwhelming, like the senselessness of putting *everything* on a bagel.

As discussed in our last newsletter, this can be incredibly alienating. But part of the mission of Overtone is to help people and companies understand the internet in a way so that they can make sense of it and contribute by putting their messages out there. So we decided to bring in as much content about the Super Bowl as possible from as many different channels.

This included live transcription of the Super Bowl as it was broadcast, images of the broadcast every 5 seconds, thousands of articles from traditional media outlets, dozens of YouTube channels, broadcasts the days after, and regular questioning of GPT about what it thinks is going on (more on this in another newsletter). All of this is timestamped into a real-time multidimensional, ever-growing map of what happened.

Insights: Understanding the moment

Maybe, for example, I am a travel company who wants to get the word out about deals to the Caribbean. Fans of halftime show artist Bad Bunny are the sort of people I want to reach, but I have a big problem. Bad Bunny is mixed in with the cacophony of the Super Bowl, with his name appearing everywhere from TV listings to transcripts to tweets.

What Overtone allows is looking at the narratives around Bad Bunny, before, during and after the Super Bowl, including which other concepts and tones are most tightly tied to him for narratives that have a particular emotion I may be interested in. You can then discover, automatically without needing to watch anything, how narratives around a subject are changing.

• Avoid the noise: We can steer clear of articles focusing on politics or divisive figures such as Kid Rock.

• Find the fun: Our model found that surprise guest appearances, by Lady Gaga and Cardi B. among others, created adventure and joy narratives, which is exactly where this travel brand wants to be.

Activation: Be in the moment

Understanding what’s happening online is one thing: acting on it is a different ballgame. Because Overtone uses semantic, emotional and image based signals (and zero personal data, ever) you can place ads next to exact right content on any channel.

TV Images: Overtone’s system analysed almost 4000 images from the Super Bowl broadcast including the halftime show. Of all those more than 5 hours of images, the model for the travel campaign said that the images that were the most resonant were when Bad Bunny put on a wedding. He danced with Lady Gaga and others to his song Baile Inolvidable as the party swirled around (6:30 and onward here). Other top moments included fireworks and another big dance number.

Articles : Of course the moment of the Bad Bunny wedding did not live only on NBC and other broadcasters. Moments as they are understood by Overtone become narratives that spread and change as they do. Our Bad Bunny happy travel moment has a peak during the broadcast itself, but also bumps afterwards such as reporting that explains the wedding on stage was in fact a real wedding.

YouTube: The moment continues on as it moves from the written word to formats that take longer to produce, such as YouTube videos. You can see in the chart below the moment continuing with a wave the following day, Here also Overtone’s ability to highlight specific narratives is important, with some news creators playing up the culture war angle you may want to avoid, and others focusing on the wedding and the celebration of Latin America that is more aligned with the travel campaign’s ideas. As this content is included in the analysis, the model also updates itself to take in new information about what might be relevant as time moves forward.

Omnichannel: CTV & LLMs: This narrative understanding can go anywhere where the content is available. For example, when two days after the Super Bowl a local New York NBC station did a segment on a dancer who dressed up as a bush during the show, it would be possible to use Overtone to run your aligned ad campaign in the next available Connected TV slot on the streaming service Peacock.

Similarly, the world is beginning to understand how advertising on LLM interfaces might work. Overtone measured how one LLM responded to questions about Bad Bunny submitted every day, and tracked the answers. Unsurprisingly, there was a boost in happiness the day after the Super Bowl. If I am an ad agency I can choose when I would want to have my ads next to a subject being mentioned by GPT, and when I might want to avoid it.

Sponsoring the moment

Overtone can do all of this monitoring not just because it is interesting to know all of the different nuances of how narratives form and change. Ultimately we believe that this level of insight gets into a more human, more artful way of understanding the world online, which has traditionally been dominated by blunt metrics such as clicks and keywords without knowing the full context of the cultural moment.

Using Overtone’s moments, you can track the narrative as it spreads and make sure your message is there too, essentially sponsoring the moment like you would sponsor a match or conference (or wedding) in the real, physical world.

This was not possible beforehand, but now can be done at the speed and scale of the internet, making sense of the chaos out there by putting it on a map, and watching that map change over time.

Overtone is a machine that tries to understand moments like a human, but can take in the everything everywhere, all at once.

If you would like to see our Super Bowl data or discuss a big upcoming event (like the FIFA World Cup) get in touch at business@overtone.ai