ESA Member Spotlight: dentsu Sports Analytics

Can you give us a summary of what differentiates dentsu Sports Analytics in the research and measurement marketplace?

We’re on a mission to maximise the return that our partners and prospective partners can achieve from their sponsorship activity.

Our proprietary industry survey, Frontier, shows that less than 20 per cent of the industry are ‘very confident’ they can measure the business value and return of their sponsorships. We’re ready to play our part in moving this figure upwards.

Utilising additional resources from dentsu agency, Merkle (one of the most advanced data analytics and customer experience businesses) and with dentsu’s broader data and media analytical capabilities, dentsu Sports Analytics has access to unrivalled data, in addition to targeted audience and digital marketing capabilities. Our focus is to use these exceptional resources and our in-house team of specialists to enable our clients to measure the business value of their sponsorships and feel confident that they are maximising their return.

Who are your customers?

We work with a range of brands and rights holders across the globe. From clients in the existing MKTG Sports + Entertainment ecosystem, to partners from across the wider dentsu network, we pride ourselves on being able to shape our offerings to meet varying objectives. 

This wide customer base allows us to access relevant data sources but also to understand the marketplace from both a rights holder and a brand point of view. Ultimately, having better knowledge of ‘both sides of the table’ helps us deliver better results in partnership work. 

Do you have any proprietary tools and services that give you a clear USP?

Our product portfolio crosses three key pillars:

1. Understanding Fans
2. Assessing Value
3. Measuring Impact

We have several products that we can offer globally and have a dedicated team who are constantly evolving these tools – or developing new ones – to meet the demands of a changing market.

Our three core products are:

• People & Fan Connect – we have fused our proprietary audience survey, Decoding, with our dentsu Consumer Connections System (CCS). This allows us to undertake fan/audience segmentations to understand consumer behaviour linking sponsorship receptivity to content and ultimately to media planning.
• Amplification – a global standard for valuing IP where we measure the business uplift of a brand association with a specific rights holder property. This unique score is also used to provide an IP value to our asset-based Valuation Model, providing a fair market value for rights.
• Return on Sales – traditionally seen as the ‘holy grail’ for sponsorship measurement, we are working closely with our colleagues at Merkle on establishing a methodology for tracking the act of following or attending sports events with brand visibility to conversion to sales. We’ll have more updates on this soon.

How do you add context and understanding to your work?

We have invested in research to understand audiences, fans and the marketplace:

• Decoding encompasses data gathered in 20 different countries across five continents to provide a deep dive into fan attitudes and behaviour around sponsorship and activations. By combining these findings with CCS, we have an unrivalled data set across more than 11,000 attributes obtained from 268 million people.
• Our FanSpeed Study provides us with regular updates on fan behaviour and topical issues. Our latest study tracks the current effect of the economic downturn on sports and entertainment spend, shifting perceptions around women’s sport ahead of the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 and perspectives around controversial topics such as sports-washing and green-washing.

Frontier is our global industry study helping us to understand trends, opinions and actions. Our 2023 survey has just launched, showing that the sponsorship market is strong, while underlining that in a challenging economic climate, leveraging assets is going to be key.

What are the challenges that you face?

We know that there is a lot of data out there, probably too much as people feel inundated with social and digital dashboards. However, from Frontier we find that less than one in five industry professionals are confident they are maximising the use of this data.

Ensuring that data and insights budgets are included across the full sponsorship planning process is always a challenge, and often evaluation of success is only thought of after a campaign is concluded, which is often too late to finetune campaign and activation strategy.

We need to demonstrate how the right data with actionable insights can help the decision-making process to get the best-fitting partnership and in turn improve delivery and activations on an ongoing basis. It’s vital to educate the industry on how to effectively utilise insights and analytics to drive better performance. We passionately believe that having a strategy guided by insights and analytics saves clients money by helping them evaluate impact and giving them a higher return on their investment.