Google insight for search

I've been playing around with the Google Insights for Search tool, and found some really pretty graphs. Here's the popularity of chocolate, as a food and drink related search over time, complete with a big bump each Christmas and a somewhat smaller bump each Valentine's day:

On the dessert theme, we can also see the seasonal rise and fall of cookies, pies, and cakes:

There's a Mason-Dixon line for interest in cookies:
with cake interest centered in the South East:
Finally, Facebook is clearly the new MySpace:

McDonald's or Starbucks?

A recent Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends survey included the following question "Just for fun: Would you prefer to live in a place with more McDonald's or more Starbucks?" They've issued a brief report summarizing how people answered the question:
The researchers even carried out a multivariate regression analysis:

It shows that, once one controls for all the factors cited above, the variables that do the most to explain whether someone chooses Starbucks over McDonalds are: having a college degree, having a high income, being a liberal, being a Westerner and being a woman. For example, other factors held constant, a liberal is 13 percentage points more likely than a non-liberal to favor Starbucks over McDonald's.

Super Bowl Ad Prices

Super Bowl ad prices provide a lot of opportunities for interesting comparisons and conversations. The original price for a 30 second ad in Sunday's game $3 million, but according to Bloomberg news, only 12 of the 67 spots actually sold for that much, with two of the last ads to sell going for the "bargain" price of $2.4 million (20% off!). NBC had a record $206 million in ad revenue, which would actually work out to an average of over $3 million if there were, indeed, 67 spots. I'm not sure how those numbers relate to one another; the ad revenue total does not include pre- or post-game ads, but maybe it includes non-national spots or "revenue" for those spots promoting other NBC shows?

AdvertisingAge provides a table with a lot of historical context for Super Bowl ad prices from 1967 to 2007, giving the actual price, the inflation adjusted price, the average rating, and the average numbers of homes and viewers watching the Super Bowl. (There's clearly a problem with the listed actual, non-inflation-adjusted, price listed for 1983; it should almost certainly be $400,000, and not $1,400,000. The error doesn't propigate to the inflation-adjusted prices, fortunately.)


MSNBC has a graphic showing the cost and number of viewers over time:

Here's a graph that I created, based on the AdAge data, which shows the CPM, or cost per 1,000 views, in 2007 dollars:
I'd really like to compare the Super Bowl ad prices with the cost of other ads. I'd need to do some hunting to find relevant data.

Finally, and not directly about ad prices at all, the New York Times has a really cool interactive map of popular Twitter words around the country during the Super Bowl (found through Flowing Data.)