BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Did our partnership assets reach the target audience or demographic? What is the broadcast media value of a jersey sponsorship? What is the impact on customer retention and acquisition? Those were the questions FlyQuest Sports was thinking about as the team headed into the 2018 North American League Championship Series (LCS) for League of Legends (LOL).
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Even though we have Block in our name, Block Six Analytics is not a blockchain company. However, we do see blockchain technology impacting our business in ways that are likely to surprise many in the sports industry. More specifically, blockchain could alter sports media and sponsorship in counterintuitive ways.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Famed management consultant and professor Peter Drucker is arguably most well-known for the axiom, “What gets measured gets managed.” That is one reason why the results of a recent study of sports partnerships by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) are so surprising. The ANA found that only “37% of respondents reported having a standardized process for measuring their return on sponsorship.” So why are so few sponsorships being measured?
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is releasing its annual PwC Sports Outlook this week focused on the North American market. While there are several pieces of good news for the sports industry in terms of annual revenue growth, the most interesting to Block Six Analytics (B6A) was that “the sponsorship category will be the industry’s biggest mover, growing 4.1% year-over-year.”
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
The NCAA began the process to change its rule to enable collegiate athletes to profit from their names, images and likenesses "in a manner consistent with the collegiate model." My co-authors and I addressed this issue in The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders For A High-Performance Industry (copyright 2015). The portion from the book on the topic is included in this post.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
The number of students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) on college campuses throughout the U.S. has increased significantly since 2008. What is not surprising is that the primary casualty of this increase are the humanities majors that now are at their lowest levels in decades. What is surprising is that many economists are worried about the decline in humanities majors for reasons that directly impact the sponsorship industry.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Earlier this month, we highlighted how Beyond Meat partnered with NBA players to help facilitate the company’s rapid growth. In particular, Beyond Meat focused on working with players that would communicate about their experiences organically consuming its plant-based products rather than solely focusing on the most well-known athletes. Dove Men+Care is seemingly taking the exact opposite approach in its most recent campaign by featuring “everyday” athletes that share names with famous professionals including Chris Paul, Sean Williams, and Alvin Suarez. In particular, Dove is using name recognition to drive interest whether or not the famous athlete actually uses the products. A deeper analysis of the Beyond Meat and Dove approaches, however, show that both companies appear to share the same strategy even if they are using different tactics.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Sponsorship could be more effectively managed with better consistent and standardized approaches to measurement. Yet, “gut instinct” still plays a significant role in negotiating, valuing, and managing of sponsorships. Why is “gut instinct” still employed frequently in management decisions if measurement is the key to more productive relationships and outcomes?
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Beyond Meat has been one of the most positive initial public offerings (IPO) this year, and the plant-based protein company’s novel relationship with several NBA players has been a critical component of the story. More specifically, these partnerships are a case study for how star and non-star athletes can serve as successful influencers for non-endemic brands to their sport.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Stanford Graduate School of Business marketing professors Navdeep Sahni and Sridhar Narayanan recently completed a study to determine the effectiveness of retargeting campaigns. The results have interesting implications for the sponsorship industry with the San Francisco 49ers being a case study for how to potentially implement their findings.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
A recent The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) post contained the provocative headline “Football Coaches Are Still Flunking on Fourth Down”. This post demonstrates how NFL coaches are “still too conservative on fourth down” because they instruct their teams to punt or kick a field goal when the math states that going for it actually increasing the chances of winning a game. This post is particularly surprising because research has been done on this specific topic for years. It is now so clear from a mathematical perspective when to go for it that New York Times (NY Times) created the NYT4thDownBot. Why would coaches, as former NFL coach Dennis Green, not “play to win the games?”
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
American Express announced a multiyear title sponsorship deal that changes the name of the PGA Tour event most recently called The Desert Classic to The American Express. The primary reason the company appears to be returning as a title sponsor for the first time since 2006 appears not to be what many people expected.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
One of Shakespeare’s most famous passages comes from a soliloquy in Romeo and Juliet where Juliet says, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” While it has been used in a business context as a frame to analyze everything from baby names to books, this passage arguably applies best to asking what is the importance of a name to company or product success in brand differentiation and revenue generation.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Everything is bigger in Texas, and high school stadium naming rights deals are no exception. A recent The Dallas Morning News post highlighted how Independent School Districts (ISD) in Texas now command millions of dollars over the term of naming rights agreements for their venues. While these deals should drive significant value for partners, it is likely not for the reasons that most people expect in two ways.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Lowe’s announced earlier this week that it will begin to “carry more than 10,000 licensed NFL-branded merchandise items.” One common question Block Six Analytics (B6A) receives is what is the value of sports properties’ IP rights. In particular, how can both a potential licensor (typically a property) and licensee (typically a company) determine the revenue and brand impact that comes from licensing the marks, logos, likeness, or image of a league, team, athlete, or event. To answer this question, B6A created the Intellectual Property Analysis Platform (IPAP) within our Partnership Scoreboard. IPAP enables us to analyze the expected lifts in top-line revenues, gross margins, and operating margins that can occur from licensing IP.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
One of the reasons that Block Six Analytics (B6A) built our Influencer Platform with our Partnership Scoreboard is the power of athletes to resonate with fans as much or more than teams. More specifically, a recent example shows how athletes can secure attention for topics outside of sports and of other influencers to potentially drive audience behavior.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
In a post in December 2018, we analyzed why Allegiant Air’s new credit card partnership with Minor League Baseball (MiLB) was a good fit for the company’s strategic goals. More specifically, the company’s strategy is being one of the only airlines focused on targeting low frequency leisure travelers looking for direct flights to underserved cities such as the ones where MiLB teams play their games. That may make the Allegiant Stadium announcement earlier this week, with the company becoming the official naming rights partner of the Las Vegas Raiders, seem counterintuitive. Yet, the naming rights deal with the Raiders specifically does appear to be particularly well suited for Allegiant’s business model
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
Arguably Mark Twain’s most famous quote is “Truth is stranger than fiction.” Sports movies put this adage to the test with strange plots that would “never” happen in the sports industry. Yet, it appears that many sports movies’ attempts to be “strange” have actually been strangely predicative of important future industry strategies.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
The independent baseball Atlantic League announced that will it will use robot umpires to call balls and strikes during games for the remainder of this season. The robot umpires “uses the TrackMan, a network of calibrated lasers that work to call strikes and balls that (if all goes well) are accurate to each hitter's unique strike zone.” The Atlantic first used robot umpires during its All-Star Game earlier in July and will start using them full-time on Thursday. The idea of using machines instead of humans for specific tasks is something we are familiar with at B6A.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
One issue we are asked about at B6A frequently is whether we can determine the value of illegal streams of games, matches, or contests particularly in terms of television viewable assets such as on-field signage or jersey patches. The thinking is that illegal streams are a large enough percentage of overall sports viewership that buyers and sellers are not understanding the full value of these deals without evaluating pirated video. The problem is determining whether this type of analysis should be done and determining whether it is driving significant partnership value.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
In previous posts, we have discussed how women’s sports represents an opportunity for potential sponsors as undervalued assets for reaching target markets. In particular, we used a case study featuring LUNA Bar showing the value of its decision pay each United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) player the difference in salary between them and their male counterparts for participating in the World Cup. The USWNT members seem now to be in a position to change this situation.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
There is little doubt that the Brooklyn Nets have already had one of the most successful free agencies in recent NBA history. This off-season has seen the Nets sign Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and DeAndre Jordan to the team. Many people define success by a player’s on-court performance. Yet, NBA teams are businesses, focused on maximizing revenue generation. NBA teams, like teams in every other sport, do not rely solely on on-court performance to drive revenue. The NBA in particular has often leveraged the star power of its athletes as the centerpiece of its brand identity. Therefore, players’ values should be determined by how their on-court and off-court performance drives team revenue growth.
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
StubHub announced a new customer loyalty program earlier this week called StubHub Beyond which offers its highest revenue customers several new benefits. These include a dedicated support team, access to VIP events, and the ability to secure refunds up to seven days before an event. StubHub Beyond will initially only be available to customers that spend over $10,000 per year with the company and only in the U.S. for now, with the company looking to expand globally in the near future. There are several interesting insights that come from the launch of StubHub Beyond.
