Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.

Women athlete sponsorship deals are up 20%

“Sponsorships of women athletes, when measured by the number of deals, grew 20% in the year ending Sept. 2022, compared with 2% for men, according to a new recent report by SponsorUnited, a sports and entertainment platform that tracks sponsorships and endorsements,” Ad Age’s Erika Wheless reports.

The details: “The report looked at 6,330 sponsorships across professional and college sports from Sept. 2021 to Sept. 2022,” Wheless notes.

Essential context: “Men, though, still dominate when it comes to dollars,” Wheless adds. “All 10 of the world’s highest-paid athletes are men, according to Forbes, whose annual list includes earnings both on and off the field of play.”

Keep reading here.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “Jobless Claims Rise to 228,000, Slightly Higher Than Forecasts,” Barron’s reports.

• “Inflation increased 0.4% in September, more than expected despite rate hikes,” per CNBC.

• “Soaring rent, food costs keep U.S. inflation on front burner; labor market tight,” from Reuters.

• “When will house prices go down? These economists see a ‘prolonged slowdown’—and predict dramatic declines in home values,” per MarketWatch.

• “The historic deterioration in the U.S. housing market, as told by 3 charts,” from Fortune.

Don’t miss: “Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news,” Ad Age’s continually updated blog covering how the marketing industry is bracing for a recession.

Tubular’s deep dive into how brand affinity correlates with video consumption 

Tubular Labs, the social video analytics platform, announced the expansion of its ContentGraph technology, which allows brands to “identify audiences across 1,500 different video categories, topics and genres,” per a company statement.

What that means is brands can track engagement around much more specific video content categories than in the past. For instance, Tubular’s existing “Food & Drink” category now breaks down into subcategories such as “Coffee” and “Breakfast,” while “Beauty” now includes “Beauty Hacks,” “Nail Care” and more. And videos can get multiple category designations.

Tubular also continues to correlate its video-consumption data with other consumer data from various sources, such as search engine behavior and shopping proclivities on Amazon, Walmart.com and various brand/e-commerce sites.

Some fresh examples of such correlations—shared exclusively with Datacenter Weekly—offer some fascinating insights into the psychographics of the fans of certain brands:

• People who shop for New Balance sneakers on Amazon are more likely to watch videos in Tubular’s “Herbs & Supplements” (10.4x more likely) and “Vacuum Cleaners” (8.4x) video content categories.

• People who search for “Geico” (on Google and other search engines) are more likely to watch videos in the “Taxes” (18.4x) and “Home Automation” (16.3x) categories.

• LouisVuitton.com visitors are more likely to watch videos in the “Business Travel” (20.5x) and “Grime Music” (18.1x) categories.

Fox x InnovidXP

“Fox has expanded InnovidXP’s role on its roster of cross-platform video measurement partners, which also includes Nielsen, in a deal that expands a prior relationship between Fox’s free ad-supported Tubi and InnovidXP,” Ad Age’s Jack Neff reports. “That relationship pre-dates Innovid’s acquisition of TVSquared earlier this year.”

The details: The Fox-InnovidXP deal “covers measurement of cross-platform viewing across Fox’s news, sports, entertainment and streaming properties,” Neff notes. “Fox will use Innovid’s household-level data from smart TVs, automated content recognition and connected TV ad impressions for a de-duplicated view of audiences across Fox’s networks and Tubi.”

Keep reading here.

Just briefly

• “Meta’s VR Headset Harvests Personal Data Right Off Your Face,” from Wired.

• “Pfizer says omicron shots substantially boosted antibodies against BA.5 subvariant in early human data,” per CNBC.

• “The reason to ban TikTok has nothing to do with data security,” from CyberScoop.

• “Why Your Company Needs Data-Product Managers,” from the Harvard Business Review.

Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2022

In his introduction to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2022 report, Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson reports that advertisers scored “the second-biggest spending gain on record” in 2021, marking “an extraordinary turnaround from the pandemic plunge in 2020. Spending has continued to grow in 2022, though budgets could come under pressure as marketers grapple with inflation, rising interest rates and slumping consumer confidence amid escalating expectations of a recession.”

There’s a lot to LNA 2022—so the Datacenter team has come up with multiple entry points for you to make your own deep dive. To wit:

• “LNA 2022—10 most-advertised brands in the U.S., ranked”
• “LNA 2022—Will ad spending rise in the (coming) recession? It’s happened before”
• “LNA 2022—25 biggest U.S. advertisers, ranked”
• “LNA 2022—U.S. market leaders and category rankings”
• “LNA 2022—Big spending gains and cuts”
• “LNA 2022—What comes next after 2021's ad spending surge”
• “LNA 2022—Ad spending by medium, category and advertiser”

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.

This week’s newsletter was compiled and written by Simon Dumenco.