What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Michael Flynn, CEO & Founder of dataPOWA and the engine POWA index.
Can you tell us in less than 100 words what your company does?
DataPOWA has conceived and produced the POWA index, the sponsorship scout for the sports industry. It’s a data-driven, real-time sports sponsorship valuation engine which crawls trillions of data points across 60 unique data sets, including social media, search engines, sports media sites, broadcast output and financial information.
The resulting data is then cleaned and categorised, before being analysed using advanced machine learning techniques. The result is software delivered via an intuitive dashboard, allowing users to interrogate and compare information and monitor trends.
Who are your customers?
Our dashboard provides market context and comparisons, assisting sponsors in identifying the teams, events and competitions that will deliver on their brand objectives.
POWA index provides a holistic view of the global sports sponsorship marketplace and therefore we have customers from all standpoints, their feedback telling us how they benefit from the software. POWA index empowers teams, leagues and rights owners to demonstrate and improve their value to sponsors, giving an understanding of their and their competitors’ audiences. Our dashboard provides market context and comparisons, assisting sponsors in identifying the teams, events and competitions that will deliver on their brand objectives.
For agencies & consultancies, POWA index saves on laborious desk research from executives and managers preparing for client reports and meetings, so they can focus on big-picture thinking. Media organisations and researchers love our easy to use system, making sense of a fragmented media landscape to offer quick context and comparisons to monitor trends.
In short, POWA index allows our clients to focus their energy on winning sponsorship strategies and we believe the collective intelligence will move the sector forward.
What challenges have you encountered and how have they been overcome?
We need to continually monitor all our signals and update our algorithms in a live environment.
The way sports are consumed is changing, with the advent of live streaming, near live clips, OTT platforms and the reality that anyone can become a broadcaster on social media platforms. POWA index aggregates all of this information into a dashboard, providing instant visualisation of data & analysis, therefore we need to continually monitor all our signals and update our algorithms in a live environment.
Sponsorship measurement still has an element of ‘hit and hope’ to it because of the data which is available.
Sponsorship measurement still has an element of ‘hit and hope’ to it because of the data which is available, difficult to access and extremely expensive for all but the wealthiest organisations and brands, so there’s a ‘disruption’ opportunity here. We’ve spent over 12 months optimising our core engine to ensure we’re outputting reliable data and concurrently we’ve revised our initial thinking regarding pricing to make POWA index accessible (entry price point £2,495), because we want everybody to have access to the same level of information, whether they are FC Barcelona or Birmingham City. It is a very different product and different package from those offered by the major media monitoring and analysis companies.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Hopefully, my two careers in sponsorship & digital marketing will benefit the rapid growth of POWA index, which we’re confident will become the industry standard. I’ve been in sports sponsorship for over 30 years, formerly as Director of Sponsorship for Carling’s award-winning sponsorship of the Premier League, before moving on to explore and pioneer aspects of digital marketing through companies including Total Sports Online, Fast Web Media & Intelegentsia.
At Fast Web Media we conceived and developed WeatherFit – revolutionary technology which linked digital advertising to forecast weather conditions, delivering a massive benefit for the retail sector, and, while at InTELEgensia, we built and sold a product which synched second screen advertising to programming on mainstream television.
Contact dataPOWA: hello@datapowa.co.uk
