– Richmond Football Club first sporting team to sign with Nielsen platform

SYDNEY: 29 April 2019 – With more than $200 million dollars in sponsorship spent each year – and growing – sponsors and rights holders are demanding more than just a winning performance when determining where to place their marketing dollars. Increasingly, sports teams need to demonstrate evidence of the impact and influence on fans’ perceptions, attitudes and purchase intention towards their sponsor’s product.

Wanting to score big with the sponsors, the Australian Football League (AFL) led the charge two years ago and began using Nielsen Consumer and Media View (CMV). Nielsen CMV tracks sports fans’ attitudes and behaviours towards specific brands and product categories including automotive, technology/telecommunications, travel, general insurance, private health insurance, food and beverages.

Surveying 22,000 Australian consumers aged 14+ annually, Nielsen CMV data is weighted to the total population using estimates from the Australia Bureau of Statistics, producing statistically reliable results for the entire population.

Kylie Rogers, General Manager, Commercial, AFL says: “The AFL strives to consistently provide value for our corporate partners, and through Nielsen CMV, we are able to deliver deeper fan and category insights to create more effective solutions. We have also successfully used Nielsen CMV to identify and target new categories that offer untapped partnership opportunities.”

Insights are being used more to drive commercial growth across the AFL industry, with the Richmond Football Club becoming the first of several AFL clubs to subscribe to Nielsen CMV at the start of this year.

Richard Fox, Head of Business Intelligence, Richmond Football Club, says: “Our game is now consumed through a large range of channels and touchpoints, whilst understanding each is important, it only paints part of the picture. Nielsen CMV is an important component in how we understand our entire audience and the impact we can deliver for our partners.”

Monique Perry, Managing Director, Media & Sports, Nielsen, says Nielsen CMV has surveyed consumers across Australia for more than 20 years, capturing an array of insights that help businesses tackle strategy, marketing and media challenges.

“It’s fantastic to support leading sports organisations to unlock, prove and grow their businesses through Nielsen’s core sponsorship exposure information coupled with currency media and consumer data, via Nielsen CMV.  

“Nielsen CMV is used by Australia’s major publishers, agencies and brands as a key data source for deciding who to sponsor, so it makes sense for sporting clubs themselves to use this same data,” concluded Perry.

As a response to market demand, Nielsen will also be launching in the first half of this year a new solution for the sport business industry called FANLINKS. Fusing together two of Nielsen’s powerful data sets, SportsLink and CMV, FANLINKS will deliver singular access to the most robust and holistic sports consumer data tool in market.