There's the story they tell — the narrative, the positioning, the cultural presence. And there's the story the market tells — stock price, revenue, margins, growth.
The Tension Index measures the gap between these two stories. Every day, an automated pipeline pulls data from Wikipedia, Google News, Yahoo Finance, and AI-powered sentiment analysis. It scores 1,200+ brands on cultural relevance and business performance, then calculates the distance between them. For private companies without stock tickers, a proxy business score is derived from news volume, sentiment, and Wikipedia presence.
That distance is the tension. And tension is where the interesting questions live. Why is a brand culturally dominant but commercially struggling? Why does another brand print money while nobody talks about it?
This project comes from 15 years in advertising strategy. I've spent my career in the gap between what brands say and what they do. The Tension Index is an attempt to measure that gap with data instead of instinct.
CULTURAL SCORE (0–100) — Wikipedia pageview momentum, Google News article volume, AI headline sentiment analysis. How much the world is paying attention.
BUSINESS SCORE (0–100) — 30-day stock momentum, market capitalisation, revenue growth, profit margins. What the market actually thinks.
TENSION = |CULTURAL − BUSINESS| — The absolute gap. Low tension means alignment. High tension means someone's wrong — and that's where the story is.
Python pipeline, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS frontend, Netlify hosting, GitHub Actions for twice-daily automation. Entirely built with Claude Code. I'm a strategist, not a developer — but I believe the best way to understand something is to build tools that measure it.
Mike Litman — Strategy Director, London. Obsessed with the intersection of culture, brands, and data. This is one of several projects exploring how to make cultural patterns visible and measurable.
See also: Taste OS · CultureTerminal · Modern Retro · The Pattern · Taste Engine
Get a weekly digest of the biggest tension movers, AI insights, and market analysis. No spam.