Are Super Bowl commercials worth the money?

I’ll admit it: I wasn’t even going to watch the Super Bowl last Sunday. I’m training for a half-marathon, and left to my own devices I would have been perfectly happy to spend some quality time with my pajamas after the morning’s nine-mile run. But then fellow KALW producer Angela Kilduff alerted me to Wired.com's Biometric Super Bowl Party here in San Francisco. The folks at Wired had teamed up with Boston-based Innerscope Research to wire up their readers with sensors and measure their responses to commercials aired during the game. An afternoon where walking around wearing five pounds of recording equipment wouldn’t distinguish me from the crowd? Count me in.

The party was held at Wired’s SoMa offices and offered all the Super Bowl standbys (pizza, chips, beer) with a nerdy twist (beer dispensed from a tricked-out refrigerator decorated like an iPhone). Once everyone was hooked up, their information was fed individually into the computers throughout the game. Innerscope will spend the next few weeks slicing and dicing the data. In the meantime, though, Innerscope co-founder Brian Levine was happy to provide some insight into the real-time data, which he kept track of all afternoon on a two-iPod setup. To find out what we learned, stay tuned for my story about the event next week on Crosscurrents.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user magerleagues.