The goal is to show ROI for ad campaigns and help advertisers
measure ad effectiveness, benchmark against other advertisers in
their category, and plan budgets according to impact on audiences
across channels. The sports media powerhouse has conducted
cross-platform research for a "number of years now," according to
Barbara Singer, ESPN's VP-advertiser insights and strategy. What's
new is the continual nature of this research.
Rather than merely measuring results cross-platform in relation
to a particular sporting event, as was often the approach in the
past, the new system allows ESPN to gather data on consumers on a
perpetual basis. This allows the company to understand ad impact
and exposure over time and track metrics according to purchase
intent, ad awareness, word-of-mouth related to brands, and
fandom.
"What we realized is that we needed something that was beyond
one event and something that would go year round," said Ms. Singer.
"Different sports have diff dynamics in terms of how fans
consume."
ESPN asks survey participants about 24 brands across five
advertiser categories; a few of the brands monitored are not
current ESPN advertisers, according to Ms. Singer. The company
works with market research company SSRS, which conducts online
surveys and layers in data from phone surveys every six months to
recalibrate models. Both sports-media consumers as well as people
who have not been exposed to ESPN content are included in the
studies, which use non-sports nuts as a control group.
The company began the survey process in August 2012, using a
random cross-section of respondents. On top of the survey data,
information about advertiser ad schedules with ESPN, media-spending
data from third party sources, and data showing whether campaigns
are producing a word-of-mouth effect. Social and search data is
coming, said Ms. Singer.
ESPN just started showing off the data to clients a month ago.
For now, it is offering them only a combined view of all the ad
campaigns measured, so individual advertisers will not see
information specific to their own campaigns. They will get insight
on how 15-second spots perform compared to 30-second ads, for
instance, in addition to information on mobile ad impact and which
campaign flight strategies perform best for certain goals.
The survey data has led to a different type of conversation with
ad clients, said Ms. Betron, in part because the research can
influence how advertisers allocate budget across media. "We're now
in a dialogue that's a much more a consultative dialogue."
As advertisers clamor for cross-media measurement, ESPN
certainly is not alone in its quest. Nielsen conducted a test of
its own approach to providing a view across television, desktop and
mobile during the Sochi Winter Games in February. The firm will
begin combining mobile viewing ratings with television ratings in
the autumn.
Because its research is in the early stages, ESPN would not
share many distinct trends emerging from the data. However,
according to Patricia Betron, ESPN's VP-multimedia sales, the firm
determined that digital video boosts effectiveness for any metric
at a more rapid pace compared to TV, and mobile video works
especially fast.
"We have quite a long list of questions that we'd like to dive
in and start to answer," said Ms. Singer.
Data incorporated into the model includes seasonal sports
insights. For instance, we can see the longitudinal effects of
unaided brand awareness over the course of the NBA season. In this
example, we can see that the campaign of an official NBA sponsor
pays dividends year round vs. non-sports fans, but is especially
valuable during the playoffs. This connection is primarily driven
by avid fans when they are most engaged with the game.
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CORRECTION: An earlier
version of this story incorrectly reported that the ESPN
measurement offering is called XP Tracker. Also, while the
initiative was begun in 2011, ESPN started fielding the study in
2012.