To illustrate the connection between confidence and success, we created a social platform called “Most Confident Fan” to find the NFL’s most confident fans and teams.

But how do you accurately assess the confidence of a fan or an NFL team?

We combined the way fans voice their unfiltered passion and support of their team through their social posts on Facebook and Twitter with the cognitive abilities of IBM Watson.

We developed a proprietary algorithm that worked with Watson’s Personality Insight API, and had Watson scour through each fan’s social media posts. By analyzing and filtering through the words and tone fans used to support their favorite NFL team, we were able to convert confidence levels into measureable data.

We then ranked fans based on this data. Fans were motivated to improve their scores by a leaderboard that was updated in real-time…pitting their results against other fans of their team. This ultimately became the mechanism by which fans could enter to win a trip to the Super Bowl.

It’s no secret that data is at the core of the NFL. Players are constantly judged on both their in-game performance to their physical abilities. However, we wanted to apply a new metric that didn’t have anything to do with on field performance.

To do so, we developed a proprietary algorithm built off a regression analysis. First, we created a model that determined which personality traits, as defined by Watson, correlated to what we define as “confidence.” These personality traits were then grouped into 5 weighted categories – Assertiveness, Discipline, Competitiveness, Calm and Fandom. Through prototyping, we also found that these character traits yielded different results when conditions changed – meaning that history and current circumstances both had an impact on confidence.

Next, we aggregated all the tweets from all players on each NFL team, and ran them through the algorithm to determine an overall player confidence score. In addition, we gauged fan confidence in each team by running fan social posts through the same algorithm. Once combined, we had a confidence score for each team heading into every game that was used to predict the outcome.

This initiative was promoted organically. The average participant visited 75% of the site spending over 20 minutes interacting with mostconfidentfans.com. Additionally, the average user spent well over a minute on each of the pages that we created, a testament to the unique content that we had.

The promotion drove over 212,000 organic impressions across Facebook and Twitter, and 3,000 organic social engagements.

The #MostConfidentFans hashtag was used 2,600+ times from Sept. 1, 2015 - Jan. 31,2016.

#MostConfidentFans was the second-most used hashtag in conjunction with #SuperBowl50, even beating out mentions of halftime performers including Beyonce and Coldplay.

As the first advertiser to use IBM Watson in a marketing context, We actually predicted the winner of Super Bowl 50 weeks before the game, based on the data, they had the most confident fans. More importantly, investments with TD Ameritrade increased $800 million dollars during the initiative.

As access to data increases, TD Ameritrade, in an industry-first use of IBM Watson, wanted to demonstrate how real-time social media data, visualization and technology can be converted into an engaging tool that enhances the way NFL Fans engage with their beloved sport in a highly personal, compelling and interactive manner.

The Most Confident Fan is a celebration of the intersection of data, technology and football fans passion towards their teams.

TD Ameritrade, sought to demonstrate that feeling confident in your NFL team leads to the same result as feeling confident in your investments: success.

NFL fans are highly engaged with their favorite teams, players and accessible content throughout the entire NFL season. Between fantasy football and growing data outlets, fans crave content. From the very foundation of the idea, our core product had to provide an intrinsic value to our fan and ideally do it in a manner that was unique to what they already get from trusted outlets.

To get fans even more invested in the game, we wanted to show how the confidence they felt for their team and players, had practical implications in the real world. By connecting their virtual/digital fan passion to what was happening on the field, fans discovered new ways to participate in their most beloved sport, seeing first hand the impact of confidence.

After Watson read through a participant's social profiles and assigned them a confidence score, participants had an opportunity to raise their score by supporting their team even more, through social sharing.

We also pulled the social profiles of active NFL players and assigned each team a weekly confidence score. This enabled us to see which team was most confident going into their respective match-up and then compared the games’ predicted outcomes based on confidence scores to

TD Ameritrade is a financial services company that offers trading and long-term investment products. TD Ameritrade knows that investing successfully isn’t about luck. It’s about confidence. That’s why they provide investors with all the tools and resources they need to feel confident about their trades and investments.

As an NFL sponsor, the objective was to leverage the sponsorship by creating a consumer experience that engages our target audience (investors who were unsure about taking the reigns of their investments by themselves) with our brand’s mission - to make them more confident investors.

TD Ameritrade understands that the more invested you are in something, the more confident you become as a result.

Similarly, to get NFL fans even more invested in the game they already love, TD Ameritrade wanted to demonstrate that feeling confident in your NFL team leads to the same result as feeling confident in your investments: success.