Insider Insights: Sponsorship & Activation Spotlights Surrounding Super Bowl LVII on Social Media

February 17, 2023

The impact of Pepsi’s Super Bowl ad teaser campaign featuring Steve Martin and Ben Stiller continues to gain traction across the social scene. Lean into our quick snapshot of the highlights that our social media intelligence tools measured immediately following Sunday’s big game. Oakley and Invisalign climbed the ranks of engagement thanks to Patrick Mahomes, while Verizon’s headlining Pro Bowl Games partnership garnered the most video views. Then see the stir that Jennifer Lopez created for Super Bowl fans with just one post. Follow the infographic to see what KORE’s partnership analytics uncovered.

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Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

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Global Football Market Intel Recap: The sponsorship impact of the most engaged sport across social media

January 25, 2023

Brands looking to engage with fans around the world are well aware of global football’s value. The world’s beloved game accounts for more social followers and engagements than all other sports combined. KORE’s 2022 Global Football Market Intel Recap provides insightful analysis of the sport’s performance as it relates to sponsorship value across social media. Here, we’ll share 2022 highlights from our recent workshops.  

From Leo Messi’s record-breaking year, the strength of women in global football, why the swoosh dominates and how Louis Vuitton stole the show of FIFA 2022 World Cup; read on to learn how these events impacted sponsorship value for brands, leagues, teams and athletes across the most followed sport in the world.  

Part 1: How the Global Football Evaluation Works

In February of 2022, KORE acquired Hookit – a groundbreaking AI-powered sponsorship analytics and valuation platform. This acquisition is revolutionizing the way brands and rights holders manage, measure, and optimize their partnerships. The integration of Hookit’s data and analytics into the Evaluate Social tool (found within KORE’s Portfolio Optimization Platform) provides an unprecedented level of insight into the performance of brands and rights holders partnerships, allowing them to evolve their winners by adjusting strategy on the fly. 

Understand our Evaluation Model.

KORE’s social valuation tool helps brands learn where opportunities are to invest in sport sponsorship, with who and what assets to invest in. It helps sport teams understand how they stack up, and where to optimize their strategy and content for the best ROI for their brand sponsors. While the Evaluate Social formula is more complex, here is a high-level outline of how we quantify sponsorship value to follow along.  

The Adjusted Ad Value (AAV) formula assigns a dollar value to a social post based on how clearly logos or brand mentions are displayed within text, image, or video and how much engagement the post generates.

  • Text-only social listening tools miss significant visual attribution. 
  • Evaluate Social, designed by Hookit, can capture a brand’s social value through: 
    • Quality logo visibility 
    • Audience data and watch-through rates
    • Built-in authentication 
  • These features create a robust data story. We can track the AAV of any content created on social media that displays clear logos, deliberate tags, and keyword mentions. 
How Was the Global Football Social Scene Analyzed?

Our tools analyzed: 

  • Over 9M posts from leagues, clubs, athletes and any content that referenced (via @, # or keyword) them during the 2022.  
  • 455K posts related to the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar from Novemeber 15th – December 20th 

Social media data includes followers, posts, engagement, valuation & audience data. 

Platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo and VK. 

Part 2: Most Followers Engage with Global Football

Sometimes people follow accounts and then forget about them. Globally, people don’t forget about football. If you aren’t engaging in some way with the sport on social media, then data tells us that more than half of your friends and family could be. Global football has more total followers and engagement than all other sports combined, and 54% of social followers of sport are following some type of global football entity. 

The year of Leo

The world responded to Lionel Messi’s record-breaking year by following and engaging with his posts in a mirrored, record-breaking fashion. The legendary footballer drove more than two billion interactions on Instagram in 2022 with over 35% of them just from the last two months of the year. Only forty players in the world have 38M followers total, which was the amount that Messi acquired between November and December of 2022. Messi’s sponsors received more than $59 million in AAV from his social posts, with his world championship post becoming the most liked post in the history of social media, across the globe.

It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere

Across sport, we’re swoosh promoters whether we choose to be or not. It would take a carefully curated photo in a stadium featuring any teams, players or fans where the swoosh isn’t visible. For example, the Nike logo appears on scores of elite soccer teams’ jersey’s, shoes, and fan’s gear. Any time the team, a player or a fan posts a picture of themselves in their kit, Nike receives sponsorship value due to the Swoosh on the shirt. This value even comes from posts by athletes sponsored by rival apparel brands like adidas or Puma. 

Nike and adidas alone account for 73% of value in the sporting goods & apparel sector. Most recently, Nike earned 35% of the total value ($80.9M) earned by the top 10 brands of 2022’s FIFA World Cup. While the swoosh is everywhere, there is still opportunity for others. A well-designed campaign activation can drive outsized exposure and value seen in our next highlight. 

A luxury state of mind

You know when the ultra-cool person in the room speaks, and everyone leans in to hear? That’s the worldwide equivalent response on social to the Louis Vuitton x Messi x Ronaldo “Victory is a State of Mind” campaign. Both legendary football players posted on the campaign launch day, November 19, 2022. Ronaldo’s post created over $6.1M and Messi’s post created more than $4.3M in AAV for the luxury brand by the end of the tournament. 

With just 232 posts, Louis Vuitton earned 28x and 25x more value per post than the two leading sportswear brands during this year’s biggest global football tournament. This clearly indicates that having more promoters does not always correlate with more value, especially in the case of a luxury state of mind at the helm. 

The female fight

The incredible story of the women’s plight in the world of sports continues to grow across continents. Women’s global football is growing around 2x faster than men’s across social. The female side of the sport is attracting major sponsors like Visa, Barclays, Volkswagen and Stanley Black & Decker, who are earning millions in AAV amongst the big sporting apparel brands on social. 

However, the most viral women’s football post in 2022 was two players who almost started fighting but turned into a helping hand. Posts that show awe-inspiring moves and goals, alongside emotional, heartwarming moments garnered the most engagement. 

If you’re looking to examine your 2023 partnerships with strategic insights & impactful data, then please contact our team. We’re happy to share the full report on Global Football, or one of our other market intel reports.  

With a full report or presentation, you can: 

  • Learn what kind of impact the sport, leagues, events, and athletes have on fan engagement and why that matters 
  • Find inspiration for partnership concepts 
  • See how industry experts and peers are tracking impactful data and insights that help you measure return on objectives (ROO) or even return on investment (ROI) 
  • Leave the session with some strategic and tactical actions you can implement right away
Request a Report

Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

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Unlock the Power of KORE in 2023

January 18, 2023

Heading into the first quarter of a new year is the perfect time to reflect on your team or organization’s objectives and goals, and how they can be achieved.  If you are looking to make gains in the sponsorship space, then leaning into KORE’s mission to help you improve your partnerships could be the game-changer needed. Let’s take a look at four ways you can get the most out of your partnerships this year, with the latest insights, tools, and industry expertise.  

1. Objective Setting: Start Small For Big Gains 

No two brands or teams are the same and each have their own objectives and goals. With every client that we onboard the first step to improving any pain point is identifying and setting measurable objectives. Let’s say you’re part of a major NFL team that wants to increase revenue from long-established brand partnerships. Figuring out how to start that process can be overwhelming. Our tools and support can help you identify a plan. Here’s a high-level example of how to approach this.

Goal: Increase revenue from established brand partners
  • Define your team’s objectives and key results (OKRs) 
    1. Example objective to focus on: first, evaluate the performance of partnerships to come up with a strategy to drive more revenue
  • Understand your partners objectives
    1. Regularly meet with partners to have productive conversations about their objectives 
    2. Collect information, insights and data that relate to your partners objectives 
    3. Ensure total alignment with partners measurement and methodologies 
    4. Provide near-time reporting (from days to 24-hours) to partners 
    5. Measure against benchmarks, adjust strategy or OKRs as needed 
    6. Set milestones to reach  
    7. Build in opportunities for revenue increase 

All of these can be achieved based on performance or other metrics identified through this process. Simplified, this process looks easy, but it takes an aligned team to build, and the right tools to accomplish. Each relationship is unique and it’s important to have tracked all the information that goes into that partnership, the data and the results, on a consistent basis to be able to have a conversation with your partners. This helps identify what you both deem is an important objective to meet together.

PRO TIPS: It’s important that these objectives are: 

  • Realistic 
  • Achievable  
  • Carrying a specific timeline for completion 

Following these tips will help ensure that your team sets goals they can reach. The goal is to not get overwhelmed by too much noise from other tasks that could derail real progress. Once objectives have been identified, it’s time to start measuring them with data-driven insights that will help inform decision-making and improve strategy.  

2. Adopt a Single Source That’s Safe, and Secure  

In a single source platform, all data, insights, and communications are gathered in one place. You can easily track performance metrics such as cost of asset, alongside utilization of creative assets like videos or images for each partnership’s activations. Any aspect of how partnerships are performing can be seen from the top by brand or partnership directors and leadership through on-demand reporting. This makes it easy to identify which partnerships are performing well and which ones need improvement or attention. Every team involved in a partnership, including brand activation, sports marketing, and asset creators, as well as finance and operational groups can easily track partnership assets and activities and improve communication, collaboration, and performance. 

We’ve taken a single-source platform a step further by including our secure data, one of the deepest datasets in the industry, to integrate with your data, which supports real-time insights at every stage of the partnership life cycle. 

3. Attract Support & Increase Value

By accessing all of your partnership information in one secure place, it makes it easier for brand managers, CMOs, partnership managers and the like to justify their budget allocations for certain sponsorships. This helps gain support from stakeholders who need tangible results before approving expenditure for further partnerships. With KORE’s Portfolio Optimization Platform, teams can provide data-driven insights that allow users to increase the value offered to their partners while meeting (and exceeding) their own organizational objectives.   

4. Gaining a Competitive Edge 

Data-driven insights are critical to making the right sponsorship decisions in today’s partnership environment. Here’s an example: imagine you work with an English Premier League (EPL) team that creates the most value out of your entire portfolio, but the value across social media remains in the middle of the pack compared to other EPL teams. Then, you might have a Formula 1 driver who has quadrupled their following and engagement, which potentially could double the value they create for your brand across social. It’s helpful to understand what led to the growth. Maybe a new demographic is responding to a different form of content. You can use deep insights to work with your partners across various sport to test new activation strategies quickly or over time. 

Here’s an example of how our Evaluate Social tool quantifies value across social.  

How you go about managing the data, measuring and optimizing it for each partnership can become your competitive edge. When your team is aligned with efficient processes that work toward common goals it’s much easier to gain inspiration, test new ideas and make strategy decisions to support your return on investment (ROI) or return on objectives (ROO).

Here, rights holders can explore more of our solutions designed help you build deeper relationships with fans and to measure, manage and optimize your partnerships more effectively: 

We understand that every brand or team has different needs when it comes to optimizing their portfolio of sponsorships; whether they want more transparency over their investments or better ways to track performance metrics, our platform offers the ability to add the tools when the time is right, as your business grows.  Let us know how we can help.  

Contact us for a demo of how the new and improved platform works.

Request Demo

Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

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Unlocking the Power of Data-Driven Sponsorship Workshops: 4 Ways to Leverage Market Intel on Global Football

December 20, 2022

In our data-driven world, partnerships are more powerful than ever before. If you work for a brand in the sports or partnership landscape it’s important to keep a pulse on understanding how to leverage data and find the insights you need quickly to make informed decisions about how to be a better partner.

But data can be overwhelming. How do you make sense of it all? That’s where data-driven sponsorship workshops come into play. In these sessions you can:

  1. Learn the state of a specific sport, or industry
  2. Find inspiration for partnership concepts
  3. See how industry experts and peers are tracking impactful data and insights that help you measure return on objectives (ROO) or even return on investment (ROI)
  4. Leave workshops with some strategic and tactical actions you can implement right away
The Latest on The State of Sport & Leagues

In KORE Market Intel workshops, you’ll meet industry peers and get an overview of the current landscape in the world of that sport—including leagues, teams, athletes and influencers—and gain an understanding of their impact. You will also learn about relevant events within each league and team that can be leveraged as potential partnership opportunities. Knowing this information can help you identify which league or team best aligns with your business goals, or how to improve the partnership.

Additionally, these workshops can help shed light on areas that have yet been explored or are ripe for partnering with your brand. For example: Are there any overlooked leagues or athletes who could use a sponsor like yours? What kind of impact do major tournaments have on fan engagement? Who is getting the most value, how? What are the latest trends in partnership data? These are the type questions that we will aim to answer through deep dives into the largest sponsorship dataset available.

Strategic & Tactical Actions

Data-driven sponsorship workshops also provide tangible strategies and tactics you can implement right away or plan for in the future. These strategies may include ideas inspired by content creation around partnership activations and ways your brand can actively support its partners through social media engagement efforts. From sponsoring unique giveaways at pop-up locations or in the metaverse, to creating “watch parties” involving virtual or in-person games for families or groups of fans for live events. Additionally, these workshops may provide tactical ideas about how best to support partners on social activations through specific keyword, visual or video strategies.  

Upcoming KORE Market Intel Workshop: Global Football

With the exciting wrap of the worlds’ biggest global football tournament we’re already busy preparing key insights from it. Here’s a snapshot of Louis Vuitton, the impressive brand sponsor that took nearly 9% of the total promotional value across the tournament (as of Friday, Dec. 16 2022). That’s 146x and 95x more value per post than the usual suspects.

Join KORE’s market intel workshop as brand leaders and sponsorship experts in the space discuss key insights and thought leadership around the state of, and impact of global football. Space is limited due smaller, collaborative nature of these sessions.

Choose from: Thursday, January 12th 11am EST or Tuesday, January 17th 1pm EST

Register Today

Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

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KORE’s 2022 Formula 1 Market Intel Recap: The State of the F1 Opportunity

December 14, 2022

Formula 1 (F1) has been a rising star in the global sports market for some time now, but its recent growth across digital channels and success of the series Drive to Survive on Netflix has made it a prime target for sponsors looking to gain global exposure. Our KORE market intel report dives deep into the state of Formula 1 and provides insights into how brands can take advantage of this opportunity and maximize their spend. Here, we take a look at some highlights from our recent F1 market intel workshops.

The Basics of the KORE F1 Evaluation Across Social Media

First, we need to cover how our valuation works. In February of 2022, we acquired Hookit, the leading AI-powered sponsorship analytics and valuation platform. Our teams worked together to integrate the  Hookit data and analytics into the KORE suite of products to deliver the Portfolio Optimization Platform. Brands and rights holders now have a single source to manage, measure and most importantly optimize their partnerships.

How to understand the real value of social content with the Hookit valuation model.

Our social valuation tool helps brands learn where opportunities are to invest in sport sponsorship, with who and what assets to invest in. It helps sport teams understand how they stack up, and where to optimize their strategy and content for the best ROI for their brand sponsors.

Our Adjusted Ad Value (AAV) formula assigns a dollar value to a social post based on how clearly logos or brand mentions are displayed within text, image, or video and how much engagement the post generates.

  • Text-only social listening tools miss significant visual attribution.
  • Evaluate Social, designed by Hookit, can capture a brand’s social value through:
    • Quality logo visibility
    • Audience data and watch-through rates
    • Built-in authentication
  • These features create a robust data story. We can track the AAV of any content created on social media that displays clear logos, deliberate tags, and keyword mentions.
What Was Analyzed Across the F1 Social Scene?

Over 420K posts from F1, teams, drivers and any content that referenced (via @, # or keyword) them during the 2022 season. Date range includes March – Dec.

Social media data includes followers, posts, engagement, valuation & audience data.

Platforms include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo and VK.

Growth: The General State of F1

Compared to the NFL which grew followers modestly, by 5% this past season, the clear trend for F1 across social is growth, specifically in the US, which accounted for 36% of the growth. In terms of audience, women and youth were a huge part of the growth.

 FI viewership in the U.S. was up:

  • 34% among females
  • 49% among 12-17 year olds
  • 43% among 18 – 34 year olds

FI race attendance grew by 27%, from 234k on average since the last full capacity season.

The General State of F1 Across Social

The drop in social engagement is a global impact across sport, speculatively attributed to general, post COVID ‘hangover’, a term recently coined to refer to the massive emphasis that was placed on social during lockdowns. Video viewership is up for mainly two reasons:

  1. Access and adoption of IG Reels
  2. Increased emphasis on video content amongst all social platforms

Content plays an integral role in creating deep connections between brands and audiences. It is essential to have strategies in place that capitalize on content type, its placement across channels, audience targeting metrics such as age/gender/location etc., including key influencers in the space. Additionally, understanding which specific topics resonate best with your target audience plays a critical role when formulating content strategies that drive maximum engagement rates.

Comparing F1’s Social Impact Across Other Sports Leagues

Formula 1 had a 23% increase in followers in the last 12 months quickly climbing to half of the amount of followers that the National Football League (NFL) has. When compared to other major sports leagues such as Major League Baseball (MLB), National Basketball Association (NBA) and NFL, Formula 1 comes out on top when it comes to its fans social media engagement. In fact, F1’s engagement per follower rate is the highest across all sports. This makes F1 a top choice for sponsors looking to reach a highly engaged fan base on social media platforms.

The Netflix Effect on F1: Drive to Survive

The launch of Netflix’s 10-episode docu-series Drive to Survive had an immediate impact on Formula 1 viewership numbers as well as fan engagement rates on social media platforms. Four season later, the series has provided unprecedented access into the inner workings of F1 teams and drivers which resulted in higher levels of fan interest and engagement compared with previous years. There is an excellent opportunity for brands looking to leverage this newfound interest by targeting viewers who are already engaged with the sport through their content marketing efforts.

How to Reach More F1 Fans

We found that 53% of fans who follow a Formula 1 Team account on Twitter also follow the Formula 1 account. Sponsorship opportunities could have a broader reach when you partner with both F1 & teams.

Moreover, we have even more data that drills down the overlap of fans following drivers. Contact us anytime, for a private viewing of the full data report.

A Few Key Findings
  • In general, funny, unusual, heart-warming, behind the scenes content drives engagement
  • The most viral F1 post garnered 52 million views
  • Instagram is still #1 delivering 83% of all F1, team and driver engagement and 68% of all video views

  • 71% of video views from Instagram by F1 Teams, Drivers & Owned accounts comes from IG reels (85% teams, 90% for drivers)
  • F1 posts more videos than reels on IG, yet video views are down 35% this season

Reach out to our team for the full list of key takeaways.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Formula 1 presents an incredible opportunity for brands looking to leverage sponsorship investments and gain maximum exposure within the most engaged sports community around today—F1’s fanbase continues to grow every day as more people become aware of its unique appeal and entertainment value. With data-driven insights, such as the Instagram Reels engagement, into what resonates best with audiences along with creative approaches to content creation tailored for specific demographics, brands can maximize their return on investment through engaging activations built around F1 events, properties or drivers.

About KORE Market Intel Reports

Our goal is to deliver insights and thought leadership around the state, impact and potential of sport and the leagues, teams, athletes and events within them.  The purpose is to fuel strategic and tactical actions for brands and rights holders on where to invest and how to more effectively drive partnership value.

If you’d like to schedule a time to review more insights from our privately held F1 workshops, please, don’t hesitate to schedule a demo, to hear the full story. Request a demo today.

Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

Read More

2022’s Cricket World Cup Social Engagement Kept Pace with the Last Olympics: A Short Twenty20 Social Recap

November 23, 2022

Cricket had one of its most engaged audiences ever. A quick comparison of 2022’s Cricket Twenty20 World Cup social data to the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo shows us that cricket fans watched 2.83B videos on the sport, versus 2.5B videos watched during the last Olympics. The social value created across both events was nearly identical ($67M during the games, versus $66.2M for cricket).

It wasn’t only legendary England who won the Cricket Twenty20 World Cup, but one could say that edtech brand, BYJU’S was victorious in terms of brand sponsorship value. The India-based app earned the most adjusted ad value (AAV) across social from the month-long activations of the year’s biggest cricket event. In this recap we will explain who created the most social sponsorship value, where it came from, how cricket compares to other sports, and tips on how the sport of cricket and its promoters can harness social content strategy.

First, Why is Adjusted Ad Value (AAV) Important to Understand for Sponsorship Impact on Social?

The AAV model assigns a dollar value to a social post based on how clearly logos or brand mentions are displayed within text, image, or video and how much engagement the post generates.

Text-only social listening tools miss significant visual attribution. Evaluate Social can capture up to 70% of a brand’s social value through:

  • Clear, quality logo visibility
  • Audience data and watch-through rates
  • Built-in authentication

These features create a robust data story. We can track the AAV of any content created on social media that displays clear logos, deliberate tags, and keyword mentions.

Our AI-driven Evaluate Social tool, powered by Hookit, (and found within the Portfolio Optimization Platform) enables any organization to easily track and analyze the AAV of their partners’ social media content. It’s a two-way street that helps drive stronger partnership value for brands, rights holders, athletes and influencers.

Visual Example of the AAV Model

The ‘Unseen behind-the-scenes’ footage post of India’s win over Pakistan on October 23, 2022 was the single most engaged post throughout our analysis.

What Was Analyzed

From October 1, through November 15, 2022, Evaluate Social examined 66.9k posts from athletes, organizations, leagues, team accounts (club and country), events and media accounts across the cricket world cup.

General Stats:
  • Total Engagements: 4.8B
  • Total Branded Posts: 22.8k (34% of all posts)
  • Total Branded Engagements: 3.48B
  • Promotion Quality: 16.1%
  • AAV: $66.2M

Fan Engagement Through Cricket Twenty20 World Cup

Notice the spike on October 23rd in the graph below, which is from the visual example above of the behind-the-scenes post by the International Cricket Council, with more than 600M engagements.

Top 10 Cricket Sponsors Based on AAV of Banded Posts

Any time the word “branded” is used (branded posts, branded engagement), we are referring to posts or content that includes either text (hashtag, mention, keyword) or visual (logo) promotion of a brand.

Below are the top brands that benefited from branded posts during the cricket world cup. Byjus gained the most value overall, by more than $6M, while 60% of the top 10 brands ranged between $1.99M – 6M.

  1. Byjus – $13.7M in AAV
  2. Pepsi – $7M in AAV
  3. Aramco – $5.99M in AAV
  4. MRF – $5.87M in AAV
  5. Booking.com – $4.35M in AAV
  6. Nissan – $4.35M in AAV
  7. Emirates – $3.2M in AAV
  8. Oppo – $1.99M in AAV
  9. Mastercard – $1.8M in AAV
  10. Bira 91- $1.73M in AAV

More noteworthy takeaways from the list above
  • 21% of all value goes to Byjus
  • 17% of the value comes from team accounts (club & country)
  • 95% of the value is coming from each entity’s owned accounts (vs. earned from mentions from other entities)
  • 76% of value is coming from Instagram, even though only 45% of branded posts are on Instagram
  • Twitter contributes 27% of posts, but only 8% of total value and 3% of total engagements
Top Value Drivers from an Entity’s own Social Channels

This means these three organizations or teams created the most value from their own social post strategies.

  • International Cricket Council – $31.2M in AAV, 47% of total value created
  • Indian Cricket Team – $9.4M in AAV, 14% of total value created
  • Pakistan Cricket Board — $6.5M in AAV, 10% of total value create
Top Cricket Athletes Based on AAV

These are the athletes that created the most value for sponsors.

  • Hardik Pandya drove 26% of the total value created from all athletes with $409k in AAV for:
    • Byjus — $131k
    • FTX – $56k
    • MRF – $42k
  • Rohit Sharma drove 12% of the total value created from all athletes with $192k in AAV for:
    • Emirates – $192k
  • Mohamed Shami drove 11% of the total value created from all athletes with $175k in AAV for:
    • Tourism West Australia — $102k
    • Byjus — $33k
    • FTX — $17k
Top Cricket Athletes based on Follower Growth
  • Suryakumar Yadav – 3.8% follower growth during tournament
  • Virat Kohli, 326M, 3% follower growth during tournament
  • Rohit Sharma, 68M, 1.2% follower growth during tournament (for comparison, this is two times the amount of Lebron James’ current followers across social.)
Country Cricket Teams That Grew the Most Followers
  • Indian Cricket Team – 55M, 1.1% follower growth during tournament
  • South Africa Cricket — 6.6M, 0.27% follower growth during tournament
  • Scotland cricket National Team — 231.5k, 2.3% follower growth during tournament
Club Cricket Teams That Grew the Most Followers

Club teams were much more active than country teams. The top three teams below had triple the growth over the country teams above.

  • Barbados Royals, 3.4% increase during tournament
  • Gujarat Titans, 3.2% increase during tournament
  • Multan Sultans, 2.8% increase during tournament
  • Average growth was 1.6%
How Cricket Compares to Other Sports
Total fans, engagement, and sponsorship value (AAV)
  • Cricket teams & leagues drive 6% of overall value in 2022 (1/1/22 – 11/15/22),
  • Cricket teams & leagues drive 7% of overall fan engagements in 2022, 3rd highest sport behind Basketball and Global Football
  • Cricket ranks 3rd in total followers (from team & league accounts) with 551.4M, only behind Basketball and Global Football
Discover More Opportunities

Earlier this year, we noticed a behavior shift in the popularity of short-form videos. Audience and creator preferences shifted from Instagram (IG) videos to reels. Further, the growth of IG Reels began to compete with TikTok, who was the leader of social video engagement. The data below (pulled from January 1, – November 1, 2022) demonstrates the investment opportunity that cricket offers, as the 5th largest driver of value across global sport.

Harness Content Strategy Across Your Partnerships

As audience preferences continue to shift towards short-form content, we don’t see the momentum of IG Reels slowing down in 2023. Social strategy is a critical part of investment strategy in the world of sports. If you’d like more key social insights like this, or tips on how to measure the value of your social activations then reach out for a demo on Evaluate Social, powered by Hookit.

Contact Us

Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

Read More

Sponsorship & Fan Data is Overwhelming: What You Need to Know Before Diving into Data Intelligence

October 31, 2022

When it comes to sponsorships, it’s important to take things slow and steady in order to get the most out of them. This means taking the time to understand what you want to achieve before diving into data analytics. Without a clear goal in mind, it can be difficult to know what information is relevant and how to use it effectively. Before defining partnership goals, it’s important to ask yourself a few questions:

  • What are our overall objectives for this partnership?
  • What are our goals for this partnership?
  • What KPIs will we use to measure success?

Taking the time to answer these questions will help you focus on the data that matters most and make sure your partnership is heading in the right direction. We recommend following these three steps for defining your partnership objectives.

Once you have a good understanding of your goals, you can start looking for partners that match your criteria. It’s important to be as specific as possible in order to avoid wasting time and resources on unsuitable matches. Our new Portfolio Optimization Platform holds our Intake tool which helps brands find the right partnership matches based on the criteria defined by identifying your objectives and key results (OKRs). With Intake, the best matches will be surfaced regardless of the volume of submissions, so it can scale with your business needs.

When organizations are clear on their partnership objectives, and what they stand for, the framework needed to create unique collaborations quickly falls into place. 

Once you’ve found a partner, it’s essential to manage the relationship effectively. This includes setting up regular check-ins, tracking progress against goals, and making changes when needed. Implementing a data-driven approach will help make sure all of these steps are carried out smoothly. Using a tool like Evaluate Omni will allow your team to manage the performance of all your deals and assets and benchmark diverse types of partnerships against a universal set of standards.

In short, understanding data intelligence is key to successful partnerships. Using data analytics effectively and asking the right questions can help your team build successful partnerships for years to come.

Become a data-driven organization: here’s how you can help your brand stay ahead

Becoming a data-driven organization can be overwhelming, but it’s important to get organizational buy-in to make the transition as smooth as possible. One way to do this is by taking things one step at a time.

  1. Start by identifying a small team within the organization who will be responsible for data collection and analysis. This team should be dedicated to understanding and interpreting data, and then translating that information into actionable insights for the rest of the organization.
  2. Once the team is in place, it’s important to establish clear goals and objectives. These should be aligned with the overall strategy of the company and should be measurable so that progress can be tracked over time.
  3. Finally, it’s essential to provide training and support to ensure that everyone within the organization understands how to use data effectively. This includes not only understanding the numbers, but also knowing how to apply that information to make better decisions about partnerships and other areas of business.

By taking things one step at a time, it’s possible for any organization to become more data-driven. With a designated team dedicated and committed to leading change it’s possible to see significant improvements in performance and success evolve faster than ever.

In order to make the most of your partnerships, it’s important to understand data intelligence and use it effectively. This includes taking the time to ask the right questions and tracking progress against goals. By implementing a data-driven approach, you can ensure that all aspects of the partnership are carried out smoothly.

For more information on our centralized platform, contact us or request a demonstration to get ahead with next year’s planning

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Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

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Sponsorship & Fan Data is Overwhelming: How to Support Dynamic Partnerships

October 31, 2022
Introduction

The sponsorship world is evolving as fast as technology. It’s hard for anyone to keep up. This means it’s critical for brands to learn how to cut through the noise and identify first what they want to achieve with their partnerships before diving into all the data available. Once partnerships are established, it’s important to take small steps at a time to manage, measure, and optimize them accordingly.

Data is Changing the Sponsorship World

Here we’ll explore some ways that data has impacted the sponsorship space, how brands and rights holders are responding, and what you can do to help your brand expand its data-driven initiatives.

With digital transformation comes more data, and more insights

People aren’t just watching their favorite teams or athletes on TV, or at the stadium. They interact with them on social media, in gaming and through newer digital spaces like the metaverse, with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and through Augmented Reality (AR). People consume content via social media now more than ever. This futuristic reality is already here. When brands gain deeper digital insights into how their partnerships are impacting fan behavior this information can help organizations better understand their target markets and identify new opportunities, with a fresh perspective, leading to more creative and unique activations. Additionally, data can be used to improve existing partnership strategies by measuring different tactics’ success. For example, when a brand launches a social media campaign as part of its sponsorship activation, it can use certain types of data analytics to determine whether the campaign was successful. With so many types of data points, it’s hard to determine what the most important data points are. Below we outline just a few. 

Examples of social analytics vary, but can include:
  • Total Fans – Total number of followers
  • Likes – The number of times something has been liked (all platforms)
  • Impressions – (defined and supplied by each social platform)
  • Promotional Quality – Hookit defined factors include:
    • Position – Text within a post description
    • Coverage – Based on the number and size of logos in a post
    • Crowding – Consideration of non-branded text
    • Viewership – Based on exposure
  • Fan Engagement – Average interactions per post divided by follower count
  • Earned Media – Defined by Hookit and including but not limited to
    • Earned Promotion
    • Earned Posts
  • Adjusted Ad Value – a deep, key measurement of text, image, video, hashtags, quality and engagement combined within a formula
We don’t have to measure everything, just for the sake of it

Every brand has different goals and objectives and every partnership activation can be uniquely built to serve those objectives. The critical part to understanding what data or analytics to look at is to first understand what the partnership is trying to achieve. Go back to the basics. When the objectives are clear, it’s easier to determine the Key Performance Indicators [KPIs] for that partnership or activation.

Data-inspired partnerships are well-nurtured ones

Another way data is reshaping sponsorship is how partnerships between brands and rights holders are becoming more dynamic. Post-COVID-19, data analysis has shown that the number of partnership deals have dropped while the spending has gone up. This means brands are working with a smaller number of partners that have larger investments behind them. This has led to deeper collaboration yet more budget scrutiny.

Dynamic partnerships are strategic and mindful

Through the evolution of sponsorship over the past 20 years, KORE Software’s Chief Product Officer, Marc Roots, notes that traditionally, rights holders would measure and summarize various data points providing recaps to their brand partners as a supportive service. But now we see brands and rights holders sharing more data, like ticketing and fan journey information, or campaign activation data on a consistent basis. The shift has moved from intermittent recaps to an on-demand partnership recap. “It’s something more centralized where both brands and rights holders are looking at a common set of metrics as often as daily, but more often on a week-to-week or monthly basis.” Roots continues, “As a result, you’re seeing things like assets getting swapped out, activation plans changing, different campaigns running, choosing different social channels to hit certain types of targets.”  

Creating a stronger data pulse for both sides of the partnership can support more mindful planning and swift, strategic changes for business needs.

How Technology Can Support Dynamic Partnerships

The two ways we help rights holders and brands move together dynamically are through tools and platforms. Every brand and rights holder is on a different level with their data and business intelligence tools. First, we help both types of organizations align with data terminology and learn to speak the same language. Then we get focused on where each organization is in their partnership evaluation maturity. For example, with one brand we may focus on one partnership and really work through the pain points of that key partner and measure just one thing at a time. When you want to measure everything because there’s so much data, it’s overwhelming. Start small and expand as you go. This makes it easier to bring leadership along with you and for internal culture to adapt to recent changes.

Earlier this year we officially teamed up with a long-time industry partner, Hookit, an AI-powered analytics tool, to create an industry-first centralized system for both rights holders and brands where they can collaborate and manage, measure and optimize their partnership portfolios from one spot. Read the press release here. 

Data-driven partnerships can lead to creating clear sponsorship value because of the tools and measurements that deliver insights to explore. It’s important to use the right tools to gain productive measurements that both partners can act on. Because of this, data-driven organizations raise the bar with strategic planning. They create more engaging experiences for fans and can justify marketing spending. By taking the time to understand data intelligence and its impact on sponsorship, brands can stay ahead of the curve and continue to reap the benefits of this evolving industry.

Read What You Need to Know Before Diving into Data Intelligence, to understand how to set up your partnerships for long-term success and how to help your organization become more data-driven. If you have questions or would like more information on setting up a centralized system for your partnership strategy, contact us anytime. We’re here to help.

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Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

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Why a single-source platform is essential for managing your sponsorship portfolio

October 13, 2022
Introduction

One of the most common complaints we hear in the sponsorship industry is from brands that are trying to measure ROI with no source of truth for sponsorship investments or portfolio allocation oversight. Whether it’s not being able to access or evaluate data from internal or external social teams, tracking multimillion-dollar partnership investments in spreadsheets or a lack of consistency and clarity on aligning for national or global campaigns, we’ve heard repeated frustrations about how not having a centralized system creates roadblocks, budget drains and lack of insight. A single-source platform for managing partnerships can help solve all of these issues and provide a way to measure your entire sponsorship portfolio.

What factors do you consider when measuring the success of a sponsorship?

To measure the success of sponsorship, there are a few key factors that need to be considered. The first is the overall objective of the sponsorship. What business outcome do you hope to achieve? Partnerships can be used to drive awareness, increase sales, attract a new fan base, or deepen loyalty among those fans. Once you know what your goals are, you can start to measure how well the sponsorship is performing in achieving that goal.

Another factor to consider is the target audience of the sponsorship. Are you targeting a new niche, or elevating your brand’s visibility? Additionally, you should track the reach of the sponsorship – how many people saw or heard about it? And finally, measure the engagement of the sponsorship. How many people interacted with it in some way? How did they feel about it? By tracking all of these factors, you can get a good idea of whether or not the sponsorship is successful. It sounds simple, right? We go deeper into this topic in our article on the steps for defining and measuring your sponsor partnership objectives, but first let’s look at how the right tools can save a vast amount of time and money for your organization, implementing a system that can do the managing, tracking, and measuring for you and your partners.

The benefits of using a single-source portfolio intelligence platform

In a single-source platform all data, insights, and communications are consolidated into one place. Brand directors and leadership can gain a bird’s-eye view into any aspect of how partnerships are performing. From brand activation, sports marketing, and asset creators, to finance and operational groups, any team involved can easily track partnership assets and activity and identify areas where they can improve communication, collaboration, and performance. We’ve taken a single-source platform a step further by including our data, one of the deepest datasets in the industry, to integrate with your data, delivering a game-changing Portfolio Optimization Platform that can provide real-time insights at every stage of the partnership life cycle. 

The Portfolio Intelligence Platform centralizes the following:
  • Key partnership details including deal terms, contact information and categorization features
  • Objectives and key results (OKRs) that help define partnership goals for teams to measure performance progress
  • Portfolio allocation insights that are presented in a visually appealing format for team and leadership review to support critical decisions
  • Data security from multi-level, cloud-based access with custom filters and views to see exactly what you need and when
Conclusion

Single-source platforms provide an essential overview of how all partnerships are performing collectively against set objectives. This allows for better allocation of resources and fine-tuned decision-making when it comes to investment in future partnerships. In addition, it offers a clear view of how much value different partnerships are generating so that underperforming ones can be addressed more efficiently. As such, using a Portfolio Intelligence Platform is an efficient way to manage your sponsorship portfolio and ensure you are achieving your desired business outcomes. Request a demo to see how we’ve been helping hundreds of brands meet their ROI goals with our industry-leading platform.

Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

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How to Define & Measure Your Brand’s Partnership Objectives in 3 Steps

October 4, 2022
Introduction

If you’re strategizing how to get the most out of your partnership, you’re not alone. With $57B being spent globally on sponsorships, forecasted to go up to $90B within the next five years, brands everywhere are under pressure to better manage, measure and optimize their sponsorship portfolios. By measuring sponsorships, organizations can maximize brand awareness, activations, and fan loyalty, improving the return on sponsorship investments. To create and maintain a successful partnership, both parties need to be on the same page from the beginning about what is expected and the general goals of the partnership. Defining and measuring objectives is one way to ensure alignment. In this article, we will explore three steps to help you and your partner achieve long-term success.

  • Defining objectives
  • Setting realistic expectations
  • Measuring and tracking progress
Step 1: Defining Objectives
What are brand partnership objectives and why are they important to define and measure?

Partnership objectives are goals that a brand or organization wants to achieve through a sponsorship agreement. They can be things like increasing brand visibility through unique activations like sponsoring an athlete’s official avatar in popular video games or relating to a niche audience like an online cooking school with interactive guest teaching appearances from well known artists to generating leads from social posts, or driving ticket sales from ads. Defining and measuring these objectives is important because it helps ensure that both parties are on the same page about what is expected from the sponsorship and that the partnership is productive. Additionally, data collected from objectives can be used to improve marketing and promotional efforts. Asking your partner what their objectives are can be a hard conversation to dial in. Read  our approach to how to ask your partner for their objectives in order to come out with alignment and a clear, actionable plan. 

Some common partnership objective examples include:
  • Increasing brand awareness
  • Elevating the fan experience
  • Driving ticket sales or attendance
  • Generating leads or sales
  • Aligning with corporate CSR initiatives
  • Increasing onsite traffic or social media followers
  • Targeting and connecting with an expanded demographic

IOnce the objectives have been defined, it is important to set measurable goals that can be tracked to see if progress is being made. This can be done by creating a timeline with milestones and specific target values. For example, if increasing brand awareness is one of the objectives, then the goal might be to increase social media followers by a certain percentage in a certain amount of time. A more accurate, multidimensional way to measure brand value from your partner’s social accounts is to track each partnership and earned media post that have your clear logo within an image, video or text mention. This can be done through Evaluate Social, an industry-leading tool that has built-in automation to authenticate athletes’ and artists’ stories, audience data, and watch-through rates.

This tool evolved from the flagship AI-powered sponsorship technology developed by Hookit, who integrated into the KORE family earlier this year. With Evaluate Social you can set goals and measure and monitor them against KPIs, then share insights with your partners. Measuring against these objectives will help ensure that both parties are on track and meeting their goals. The best part is, this tool will help you quantify the value of your brand’s exposure so you can enhance your strategy and sponsorship ROI.

If you’d like to learn how the McLaren Formula 1 group used this tool to drive sponsorship revenues across their team, check out this case study.

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Step 2: Setting Realistic Expectations

This step can be simultaneously done while also defining objectives, yet before measuring progress. It is important to set realistic expectations. Both parties should have a good understanding of what is possible and what isn’t. A lack of communication or unrealistic expectations can lead to frustration for either side and can even damage the partnership. It is important to be flexible and understand that not everything will go according to plan. Learn more about the balancing act of being reactive and proactive in our article on how to research partnerships for long-term success.

Things to keep in mind when setting expectations:
  • Partnerships require effort from both sides; setting up checkpoints will help everyone stay accountable.
  • Objectives should be achievable and relevant to support momentum and motivation.
  • Not every objective can be measured equally or quantitatively, yet a Portfolio Optimization Platform can support every type of objective and easily track complex performance measurements.
  • Not all partnerships are successful, but a single-source platform can increase the likelihood of long-term success.
  • Results may take time to materialize, but with KORE’s centralized platform, you can access real-time insights faster, in between a regular cadence of analysis.
Step 3: Managing and Tracking Objectives

According to recent marketing studies, executives who implement a comprehensive approach to quantifying the impact of their sponsorships can increase returns by as much as 30%. (McKinsey & Company, Bauer Gordan, and Sellecke, n.d.)

Once objectives have been set between both parties it’s important to define measurable goals so that both sides can track and evaluate progress throughout the relationship. This is what our Activate tool does for you, all in a single- source-platform, so you can spend more of your time on strategy and revenue growth. Additionally, it is helpful if the partner is aligned with the organization’s target audience and has a similar brand message. Finally, ongoing communication is key – ensure that there is regular contact between both sides to discuss progress and update each other on new initiatives.

What’s an Example of a Good Partnership?

T-Mobile sponsors Major League Baseball (MLB) and has seen much success over the ten years they have been partnered. The company has been able to increase brand awareness amongst baseball fans, deepen fan engagement, and drive ticket sales. Their activations have been creative and engaging, such as providing free in-game Wi-Fi, offering unique giveaways, and streaming games for free on their social media channels and through MLB.TV for “T-Mobile Tuesdays”.

How Exactly Do We Track and Measure Partnership Success?

Every brand has a different culture and different goals. A common theme we hear is that there are so many different data points to look at that it’s hard to identify Key Performance Indicators  (KPIs) to even measure objectives. Outside of feeling like things are going well, brands want tools that tell them what the ROI really is, but a common struggle is “there aren’t consistent KPIs across our organization because oftentimes sports marketing’s goals are different than the brand marketing team.” If this sounds all too familiar, then you’re probably in need of a source of truth that can capture all KPIs and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), that can stretch across your organization. In a few short weeks we’ll be revealing our new single-source of truth platform holding all the tools and solutions that our clients use to gain a competitive advantage, plus more. Request a demo now of the platform that contains all the tools, data and insights that currently meet the needs of hundreds of other leading brands that we work with.

Conclusion

Partnerships are a big investment, and it’s important to make sure that both parties are getting the most out of the partnership. If you follow these steps and lean on the right tools to help you define, manage and track your partnerships it will keep both sides moving in a positive direction ensuring benefits for everyone involved. While managing and tracking objectives can be difficult, our Activate tool can help you define unique objectives, measure and track progress with real-time results to adjust things as you go.  With regular communication between partners and across the teams supporting them, you can create a successful track record of sponsorship relationships that benefit everyone involved.

More Research

Read the case study on how Shell V-Power Racing is using Activate as their centralized platform, gaining real-time asset tracking, alignment and secure data transparency across their organization.

Amanda Savage, Content Marketing Manager
KORE Software

KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.

Read More
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