Sneak Peak 1: Street Cred

Pop culture is one of the primary drivers of the ebbs and flows in popularity of major consumer brands. While explicit celebrity endorsements have a long history as a marketing tool, the market exposure that brands gain from being mentioned in musical lyrics is perhaps a more pervasive form of influence. Street Cred is an experiment in brand analytics which tracks and analyzes these brand mentions in the lyrics of hip hop tracks. Each week, the most played hip hop tracks across the country are logged. Street cred searches the internet for the transcribed lyrics of each track, then runs these lyrics through a regular expression engine tuned to capture mentions of the top consumer brands. A measure of consumer exposure is calculated for each brand: its Street Cred Score. This continuously-updated metric blends the current airplay numbers for the most-popular hip hop tracks with the brands mentioned in the lyrics to determine which brands have the most Street Cred. Here’s a preview.

Top 10 tracks for the week:

The Brand Cloud, where the size of each brand is proportional to its current Street Cred score:

A sample brand intelligence page, this one for Victoria’s Secret, showing its history of brand mentions: