Brady’s Super Bowl Win Shows Value Of Loss In Influencer Marketing

BY ADAM GROSSMAN

Tom Brady’s seventh Super Bowl win and fifth Most Valuable Player (MVP) award place him in the conversation for the greatest football player of all time. However, local television ratings for the Super Bowl demonstrate a more universal concept of star power’s potential impact on influencer marketing particularly involving multiple geographies.

More specifically, the Tampa Bay Buccaneer’s success delivered a very strong 52.3 rating in the designated marketing area (DMA). However, the Boston DMA 57.6 rating for the Super Bowl was even higher than the DMA for the team that won the championship.

These numbers indicate that loss aversion played a significant role in television viewership. In particular, New England Patriots fans still had significant interest in the team’s former quarterback of 20 years one year after his leaving for the Buccaneers.

This data aligns with previous research on loss aversion. In more traditional economic theory, economists build models and analysis around people as rational actors that look to maximize their outcomes. This includes people equally weighing gains and losses for an outcome or transaction.

The rise of behavioral economics more recently has occurred in large part to focus on “inefficiencies” based on the way people act in examining their outcomes. More specifically, humans do not typically perform as rational actors in real life with biases influencing their decision making.

One of those biases comes from loss aversion. In general, people “value” losses much more than gains. A sports way to describe this is that people feel the agony of defeat much more acutely than the glory of victory. In a famous example to explain their Prospect Theory, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed “the pain from losing $1,000 could only be compensated by the pleasure of earning $2,000.”

Loss aversion has been applied before to sports. In 2009, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania published a paper titled, “Is Tiger Woods Loss Averse? Persistent Bias in the Face of Experience, Competition, and High Stakes” to explore loss aversion for golfers. In particular, golfers should only care about their score overall in a round and not their scores on individual holes in relation to par if they were rational actors.

The authors found that, “using data measuring the force of a stroke and position of a ball before the putt, the researchers determined that, on average, golfers make their birdie putts approximately two percentage points less often than they make comparable par putts. The takeaway is “this finding is consistent with loss aversion; players invest more focus when putting for par to avoid encoding a loss.”

Loss aversion, however, has not been fully applied in an off-field context. Brady provides a case study for how that could be possible in an influencer marketing context particularly given the Boston local market ratings.

The Block Six Analytics (B6A) Influencer Analysis Platform (IAP) enables our clients to value how athletes and influencers drive value to brands and teams. One of the consistent findings from our analysis is that a player changing teams drives increased fan engagement and awareness for his / her new team. In general, new players generate increased jersey sales, social media conversation, and earned media content in the local DMA.

Brady demonstrates, however, that brands should be exploring examining partnerships with athletes that change teams to help target customers and audiences in the previous DMA where they played. The Super Bowl ratings are one piece of evidence that shows fans of previous teams may be even more interested in athletes that left (i.e., loss) than athletes that arrive (i.e., gain).

The analysis does require caveats. For example, our research found the interest in players changing teams does generally dissipate over time (i.e., the first season typically has the greatest effects). In addition, local market Super Bowl ratings should be only one piece of a broader analysis on this topic.

However, targeting fans of a player’s previous team would also align with loss aversion and Prospect Theory research. This is a strategy that should be evaluated for brands looking to maximize their investment in influencer marketing.