One of the important areas of sports and sports management analytics for off the field that’s really interesting is this whole area of return on investment for a sponsorship or partnership with a consumer product brand. Teams now are being pressed pretty hard in leagues to justify why they want x-million dollars or x-hundred-thousand dollars in sponsorship fees for a consumer brand to be affiliated with them. Oftentimes they’re giving them signage at the arena live or stadium. They’re giving them broadcast advertising in their telecast of their games. They’re perhaps including them on their website for the team or the league. You’re constantly hearing these brands asking, “Why am I paying $700,000? Why am I paying $4.5 million?” It’s really incumbent upon global sports organizations to use this data that’s at their disposal. They have access to such data as demographic data and behavioral data, including the frequency of returning to a website or how long you are staying on each page of the website.
In sports management education we talked about eye tracking. There’s also eye tracking for stadium signage and all sorts of data capture devices that are monitoring the interaction or the behavior of the fan with the sponsor’s brand. One of the things that sports organizations are doing, particularly with new sponsors that they’re acquiring, is they’re trying to measure, pre and post, the affinity toward the brand by their fans. To put it in perspective, let’s say a certain football team wants to bring in a sponsor. They might do a survey and ask their fan base all across the market how they feel about the sponsor’s brand. Are they buyers of that sponsor’s brand, users of it, et cetera? Then, when they bring the sponsor in one year later, they can do the same survey again and hopefully show them that the purchase intent of the consumer, the fan, has gone up because of their affiliation with the sports team.
