As sports and brands cultivate their partnerships, data analytics presents an ongoing challenge.
There’s a plethora of social analytics vendors in the marketplace. Yet there isn’t a consensus leader that offers complete value in properly assessing the ROI or ROO impact of a campaign. This topic was broached during the IMG Sports Marketing Symposium earlier this month when ESPN’s Julie Propper said that she’s “not sure if a great way exists yet to fully understand social currency.”
Meanwhile, the NBA’s Valerie Camillo echoed this sentiment by explaining the league’s flexible policy: “We recommend social analytics vendors to teams, but ultimately it’s the team that decides which route to go.” Proper would later go on to elaborate the fact that an abundance of information is not always a good thing: “Analyzing data is just as important as quantity of data.”
The session titled, “What Sports Can Do for Brands: Measuring and Evaluating the Effectiveness of Sports Sponsorship, Advertising and Marketing” also included executives from Rawlings Sporting Goods, Navigate Research, the NFL, Sponsorship Intelligence and Churchill Downs/Kentucky Derby.
Still, what was more telling about the current and future state of sports marketing was the eclectic views on the biggest opportunities and needs in sports data analytics. Social media, global, mobile, and normalizing international data were the responses given by panelists.
(Cover photo courtesy of http://webbiquity.com/)
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