At Oscars and Super Bowl, Philly firm watches the watchers

When something like 40 million Americans watched the Oscars on Sunday – and when more than 100 million watched the Super Bowl earlier this winter – Eddie Decker and his team of analysts and editors from Front Row Marketing in South Philly were watching the watchers.

At the firm's "war room" at Comcast-Spectacor's Wells Fargo Center, and on-site at the events, with an eye watching the shows and the brand-name products in ads, paid placements and accidental appearances throughout the programming, Decker's analytics team also scans Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social-media and viral-video sites for viewer reaction.

They pass their findings to clients and would-be clients of Front Row, which negotiates sponsorship deals between sports teams, entertainment venues and producers, and product marketers, and is looking to build a rep for Decker's tracking services.

"Analytics gets in your head," says Decker, who studied sports management at Drexel. "I can't watch hockey without thinking, 'Man, they missed great signage on the boards there'," said the Mount Laurel native.

"When I watch movies, all I can see is the product placement. I saw The Internship – it was based at Google – they must have mentioned it 1,000 times, my head exploded." His analysts tracked The Macallan single-malt Scotch whiskey in the last James Bond film, and Bud Light in the Adam Sandler movie That's My Boy.

The Internet and social media in particular have made it simpler for advertisers to measure the impact of the coverage they buy and to shape their messages in rapid response to the mood of a target group of consumers, including social media users who might be oblivious to the use . By comparing paid advertising costs, to the amount, size, duration and reaction given to product mentions, Front Row hopes to assign clearer values to potential product placements and sponsorships.

So, for weeks before Sunday's Oscars, Decker and his team, which report to Front Row senior vice president Eric Smallwood, were checking traffic fans on Facebook and marketers and brand managers on Twitter were posting on the contending movies, actors and sponsors.

They calculated, for example, that Samsung Galaxy gained more than $1.2 million worth of exposure to U.S. viewers – and more abroad – from the use of one of its mobile Android phones by hostess Ellen DeGeneres in a widely-retweeted selfie photo she posted framed by award-winning actors, Smallwood told me.

And despite the fact Pepsi paid to sponsor the Oscars, rival Coca-Cola managed to get $1.4 million worth of brand exposure from its logo printed on the boxes of Big Mama's & Papa's Pizzeria pizzas delivered on camera during the segment.

Front Row's direct audience is limited and specialized -- a few thousand followers received its "tweet to tweet coverage" of such arcana at the Oscars. Some of those have mass audiences: Darren Rovell of ESPN picked up the Coca-Cola estimate and blasted it out to more than 400,000 followers. So this in itself is targeted marketing: "It's to get our own brand awareness out there," among the brands most likely to pay for realtime ad intelligence, Decker concluded.