According to IEG, sport sponsorships will be worth $40B worldwide in 2015. Advertisers believe that sports are a unique way of engaging emotionally with fans—ideally, the brand will be featured prominently in an image of a star player scoring a key goal and become connected to a moment of collective glory. Anecdotally, brands get a lot of exposure for their sponsorships of teams and athletes via images shared on social media. But until now, no one has been able to quantify the engagement of this valuable audience.
Brands have looked for mentions of their name in text associated with teams or sports they sponsor; this recent study by Brandwatch is typical of the text only approach.