In today’s digitized world, the sponsorship industry is finally primed for transformation—in the form of actionable data and measurable ROI. Somehow, it’s still difficult to come by valuable metrics, especially useful information around resulting TV exposure. But the steep price tag for brands to enter sponsorship agreements coupled with the expectation for executives to tie all spend to the bottom line are expediting the need to measure sponsorships in new ways.
Tools like real-time TV analytics are gaining ground in the stunted area of sponsorship measurement. They’re expanding on legacy solutions like Repucom and Scarborough to measure sponsorship exposure across all broadcast TV (in-game, out-of-game, and everywhere in between), leveraging visual recognition technology to automate the process and capture results faster than ever. By measuring performance outside the game, powerful earned media values can finally be attributed to sponsorships. Pardon the pun—that’s game-changing.
However, the most drastic overhaul real-time TV analytics brings with it is speed and immediacy. If you never really considered TV latency issues a pain point—humor us. Lag times are intrinsically tied to TV data, with 30-45 day delays as the norm. Your sponsorship measurement process is most likely built around these delays. And sure, teams and rightsholders probably learned to harness that extra time to their advantage, leveraging it for evaluating the data before presenting results to sponsors or executives. But take a second to imagine if you had TV exposure results in-the-moment—say an hour after broadcast airing. Yes—you lose that time buffer to present results, but you open the door to a ton of strategy opportunities that could maximize the value of your sponsorships.
Granting sponsor brands the ability to view their sponsorship TV performance, almost immediately, builds trust to further secure the partnership. And by segmenting sponsorship visuals and distributing the content on-demand after it first airs, it can be shared immediately with all relevant stakeholders. That’s instant satisfaction for all involved parties.
Rather than spending a month evaluating data in order to tell the best story, real-time TV analytics allows for that lead time to be put to proper use. Now you can strategize and make improvements to your sponsorship tactics day-by-day, hour-by-hour. It’s all about engaging and activating the most fans to turn them into buyers; it shouldn’t be about interpreting data to fit a best case scenario.
The timely and useful information from real-time TV analytics also grants teams the added benefit of proactively planning and selling future investment opportunities based on these new data sets. Imagine being in the throes of landing a partnership. By sharing how sponsorships are performing in-the-moment, you’re offering a lens into sponsorship activity and presenting transparency into how these large investments perform. These days—that’s how trust is built.
If the sponsoring brands leveraged this data on their end, separate from teams and rightsholders, it can act as an instant audit to the data offered through the partnership. It also doesn’t hurt to have the ability to demonstrate tangible ROI around both paid and earned media to executives, proving the deal is directly and significantly contributing to revenue.
Sponsorship measurement is finally evolving, and real-time TV analytics is filling data gaps and providing useful metrics that prove value quickly. For an area of marketing that’s poised for continued growth—these technological benefits are critical.
Want to learn more about how real-time TV analytics is opening the door to real-time sponsorship measurement? Visit our website or get in touch with us.
