Shocking: Live Sports Marketing

Off-Site Influence and Influence Marketing

Building brand love Video games like Fortnite have come to fill a similar role for Gen Z as golf fills for older generations, said Nicholas Walters, president and chief strategy officer at SuperAwesome.

“It’s just like my dad would have been out there playing golf and hanging out with friends – there’s a bit of playing the game, but there’s also a social experience around it,” he said.

With Fortnite activations, Ally is looking to build brand recognition by getting in front of the platform’s massive audience – about 30 million players a day, according to ActivePlayer.io.

In comparison, even The Masters, a men’s tournament in April that’s the highest-rated golf broadcast of the year, had a peak viewership of 12.5 million.

The ultimate goal is to get Ally’s name out in front of consumers aged 18-30 in ways that feel connected to what matters to them, Woodruff said.

And Fortnite skews older than one might expect, she said. Almost two out of three Fortnite players are aged 18-24, and 23% are aged 24-43, according to Verto Analytics.

“We’re testing ways to start building brand awareness and brand love earlier, so that three, five or seven years in the future, when they’re looking for a financial partner, they’ll think, ‘This is a brand that gets me,'” she said.

To make sure players on Fortnite are aware of and engaging with Ally’s Fortnite activations, the brand implemented a strategy centered on social media outreach and influencer marketing.

For example, “Tee Time Speedrun” went live last week and has a significant off-site marketing push. In the game, players try to navigate a golf ball through a series of obstacle courses as quickly as possible, which is a more brand-safe experience than Fortnite’s typical shooter-style gameplay, Woodruff said.

This past weekend, Ally organized a speedrun tournament in which players competed for the quickest times. Ally promoted the tournament through sponsored influencer content on Twitch and on Ally’s channel on the messaging app Discord.

Top-ranked participants in the speedrun tournament shared a $25K prize pool, with the winner getting a trip to attend the USGA’s 2025 US Open. SuperAwesome connected Ally with a stable of paid influencers who represented Ally’s target audience, such as Sommerset (1.8 million Twitch followers) and Aussie Antics (1.3 million Twitch followers).

These influencers participated in and hyped up the tournament in advance, driving additional organic engagement from other players and streamers.

“Discovery on Fortnite is like discovery on YouTube,” said SuperAwesome’s Walters.

Gaining traction among influence As you know ‘Kansas City Shuffle’ is the slang generally means trying to trick someone who isn’t aware of it. The article tell us about streaming platforms subscription data and the real category of Direct-to-Consumer. Normally we always come across big subscription numbers and compare those with other platforms. Usually these numbers can come from different sources, reports. But as per the article the total is a lump sum of sub-categories of subscribers.

Those are, – Wholesale subscribers, the bundles offering multiple subscriptions of various platforms at one plan, one amount. So the subscriber would be counted for each of the platform.

– Third Party direct subscribers, as I understand the subscribers of Telcos may come under this category where they get free OTT subscription along with the telco plan that is your mobile plan. There is a tussle between telcos and streaming platforms over revenue, traffic and cost to infrastructure but one cannot deny that in India majority traffic over telco is due to video and consumers are viewers too. Therefore while selecting the plan they look for the free OTT subscription offer.

– Pure Direct-to-consumer subscribers, the subscribers who go to the platform and pay directly for the subscription. Even though this is considered to be a golden number as the data for any platform since it proves the relation, the loyalty to the platform but the scenario is unlikely specially in the price sensitive markets like India.

IMO, not to miss a point here that if data could verify, large amount of viewers are catch-up TV viewers. They just want to watch their favorite TV shows that they couldn’t watch on linear TV. Also they want to watch live news and sports on the platforms of broadcast companies. This is the time of super aggregation where the consumer is looking for the wide selection of content canvas in the least amount.

The funny paradox is they can’t even discover and watch more than few out of entire content library! #streaming #OTT #media #entertainment #revenue #subscribers #consumers #video #digital #television #broadcast

Measuring the Impact of Sports Sponsorships

Measuring TV commercials is complicated enough – let alone measuring the impact of sports sponsorships. Relo Metrics is one of a handful of companies capitalizing on this niche measurement gap.

It specifically measures sports sponsorships on TV and in digital channels, including brand and logo placements visible during a televised sports game.

Relo Metrics first launched within contextual ad platform GumGum as GumGum Sports in 2017. After a $75 million investment led by Goldman Sachs Growth in 2021, the GumGum sports division was spun off and reintroduced as Relo Metrics, which now operates as a standalone company.

Brands want to cash in on live sports and the recent rise in sports livestreaming. But they need to understand the performance of their sponsorship investments alongside their TV and streaming ad campaigns, Relo Metrics CEO Jay Prasad told AdExchanger.

Prasad is a longtime data and measurement executive who previously held chief strategy roles at LiveRamp and VideoAmp before taking the helm at Relo in October 2022.

Most importantly, Prasad said, connected TV ad measurement is transitioning from panel-based to impression-level reporting – and that includes brand sponsorships within sports.

Relo is “actively experimenting” with how to unify measurement between classic TV ads and nontraditional brand placements, namely sponsorships, Prasad said.

Prasad spoke with AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: What challenge is Relo addressing?

JAY PRASAD: Sports programming has been an especially wide gap in TV measurement because so much sports consumption happens via over-the-air broadcast. Historic TV audience panels are not only small; they don’t adequately count broadcast TV households.

Even with sports livestreaming on the rise, US viewers still watch roughly 80% of live sports competitions like hockey and basketball via local broadcast, according to our analysis, and these viewers are underrepresented in small audience panels.

Buyers need much denser data sets than panels to accurately measure impressions for sports programming – including sponsorship placements on-screen.

How exactly does Relo Metrics measure sports sponsorships?

We ingest broadcast data directly from TV programmers, streaming services and regional sports networks. Using computer vision, we identify logos or other sponsor placements within three-second frames.

Then, we score the quality of the sponsorship placement, such as how many times it appeared and for how long, whether it was prominently in view and how many other sponsors were present.

We take into account the costs of running a 15- or 30-second commercial within particular sports games to determine the impression value of sports sponsorships.

We also directly survey sports fans that have watched particular events.

How do media buyers combine these results with audience measurement?

We have relationships with nearly all of the major streamers and TV networks, so publishers can combine Relo Metrics in measurement reporting for buyers.

We’re also creating new brand metrics specifically for sports. One example is return on fan engagement, which is based on a comparison of brand recall and favorability between fans who watched a particular game on TV versus in person.

Does Relo Metrics have relationships with other measurement providers?

Yes. We partnered with data and measurement company Captify earlier this summer to add more search data to our reporting. Now, we can tie search lift to specific markets or regions to measure the sponsorship impact during and after a game.

Last year, we also integrated with VideoAmp to bring its TV viewing data – including set-top box data and automatic content recognition from TV devices – into our platform to more accurately measure brand exposure throughout a live event.

More household-level measurement helps tie ad exposures to actual identifiers, which is creating more opportunities for attribution.

Does Relo Metrics also measure sports sponsorships beyond TV?

We also have