Nielsen is launching a global, connected online platform to provide sports properties, sponsor brands, and event organizers a comprehensive view of fans’ interests, media consumption behaviors, brand attitudes, and purchasing habits from around the world. At launch, Nielsen Fan Insights will cover the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, China, India, and Japan. Brazil, Russia, and South Korea will come online at the end of 2019, along with an additional 20-plus countries in 2020.
The sports industry continues to face mounting competition for fans’ time and attention as the media landscape fragments and sports content is consumed across a wider variety of devices and platforms. This competition and fragmentation, combined with diminishing consumer loyalty and an increasingly complex sports sponsorship and multimedia rights marketplace, forces sports property owners, brands, and event organizers to acquire more in-depth data to help guide investment decisions and determine ROI. The need for one source of truth has never been greater.
To this end, Nielsen Fan Insights will help drive better business decisions concerning sponsorship, fan engagement, and media rights for both rights holders and brands. By leveraging the unique insights gathered from thousands of fans around the globe, sports properties, including sports leagues and teams, will be able to better understand how to grow and engage with their fan bases, expand into new markets, evaluate media rights, and secure partnerships with sponsors.
The Nielsen Fan Insights’ web-based platform will also help sponsoring brands discover how particular sponsorships impact their brand equity, favorability, awareness, and purchasing habits among target consumers. The platform enables brands to identify and assess partnership opportunities based on metrics directly tied to fan segments and benchmark brand perceptions and awareness against their competition.
“Nielsen Fan Insights captures and delivers fan data with the depth, frequency, and consistency demanded by leading brands, rights holders, and event owners,” says Mike Wragg, Head of Global Research, Nielsen Sports. “We developed the entire user experience on a flexible platform that allows our clients to run highly customized queries in real-time to inform business decisions.”
Nielsen Sports Fan Insights integrates the highest quality datasets that the industry has trusted for years. When provided with a single point of access to exclusive datasets from Nielsen, sports properties, sponsor brands, and event organizers are able to help answer the most pertinent business questions. Nielsen Fan Insights include rich data from:
- Nielsen Homescan, a panel of households that continually provides information about all of their actual purchases across consumer segments
- Nielsen Scarborough, a US local market consumer survey that asks what people watch, attend, or listen to and where they shop, what they buy, and what interests they have
- Nielsen Winning Brands, a model that measures brand awareness, consideration, and image before, during, and after an exposure to consumers through a sponsorship activation
- Nielsen Global Fan Survey, a new monthly global tracking survey of sports fans
With the datasets combined into a single, flexible platform, sports properties are able to filter and benchmark fan behavior against other properties and the general population by country, in addition to uncovering emerging trends on a monthly basis and exploring the types of products, services, and industries most connected to particular fan bases.