Long after the Cardinals and Steelers finish pounding the daylights out of each other Sunday, the ads that made the broadcast possible will continue their fight for the pocketbooks of America.

It'll take days, weeks and even months to sort out the winners and losers of Super Bowl Sunday. Will Albritton of The Bee plans to blog live about his impressions.

The best advertisements have a tight coherent story that relates to the product or service it's meant to promote, said Dr. Carl Marci, director of social neuroscience for the Psychotherapy Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and CEO of Innerscope Research, which will conduct its second annual review of all ads that air during the NFL championship Sunday.

Marci's Innerscope plans to conduct a live biometric test on a group of 40 football fans -- half supporting the Cardinals, half supporting the Steelers. The idea is to tap consumers' deep emotional responses, Marci told Adweek.com.

"We measure emotions where emotions are experienced," he said in a telephone conversation.

The fans will be sequestered separately, according to team, each dragging a friend along to undisclosed locations in New York to watch the game. There the test subjects -- fans who are not too super or too casual -- will don specially designed vests that measure hand sweat, heart rate, respiration and movement. Then they'll watch the game.

Just like your average Super Bowl party, Marci said.

Except everything they do during the breaks will be recorded and analyzed. Last year, Marci said his test subjects -- 30 of them -- generated about 100 million data points to be crunched through a computer and studied.

It's cool stuff. Say an ad makes your heart leap, it'll register on the EKG. Should one cause arousal (of any sort), it will show up in palm sweat. Maybe an ad takes your breath away, showing up on the respiration monitor. Perhaps you move forward as an ad plays, giving researchers a hint as to your interest.

Marci said he found that test subjects watching the pilot to the ABC drama "Lost" held their breath up to 14 seconds. They were into the show. Really into it.

There are other ways to study ad performance. There's a dial test in which those watching rate a particular ad. There is EEG testing measuring brain waves. And there are other outfits, such as The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, which is gearing up for its fifth-annual Kellogg Super Bowl Advertising Review.

Marci's Super Bowl work demonstrates the flexibility of his technology. He and his company also work with advertisers in the ad development process, helping agencies determine what is most likely to generate sales for a client.