The targeted advertising strategy that Barack Obama used as he won the 2012 U.S. presidential election is being shopped to sports teams, leagues and sponsors this year.
Rentrak, the audience research company that worked on the Obama campaign’s targeted media strategy, has formed a sports division that it’s launching publicly this week to compete with Nielsen for a share of the growing sports measurement business — from television ratings to in-arena attendance.
More than $20 billion was spent on sports sponsorships and $10 billion on sports media rights last year, according to Rentrak executives. They suggest that the sports marketing research market is worth around $60 million a year, and they want a piece of it.
“The audience that is watching live sports is incredibly valuable,” said Bill Livek, Rentrak’s vice chairman and CEO. “Ads placed in stadium or on TV have enormous value, but only when accurately measured.”
Rentrak has six people working in its sports division in Manhattan. Former Nielsen Sports employee Tom Sommer runs the division and reports to Gary Warech, Rentrak’s senior vice president of advertiser, sports and branded entertainment sales.
The firm’s sports division quietly has been operating since February and has several sports-focused clients, such as NFL Network, NHL Network and the Canadian Basketball League. Rentrak has done work for companies such as Repucom, WWE and IMG as well.
Rentrak has built a business around the collection of reams of data on what people are watching on television, gleaned from set-top boxes that are in about 15 million homes. The firm has deals with DirecTV, Dish Network, Charter, Cox and AT&T U-verse to mine that data. It says it is the only company that can capture such deep and detailed data.
It now plans to extend that business to sports teams and leagues by providing data about the fans going to games — what they are seeing in stadium, what kinds of cars they are likely to drive and what they watch on television.
Rentrak has the capability, for example, to match specific car owners against TV ratings information in a specific market. Rentrak says privacy issues do not come into play because it does not use specific names or addresses. But company executives can learn how many Jeep owners live in a given town, and they can determine what TV shows those people are watching.
Sports networks have been slow to adapt to Rentrak to date because of inconsistencies with its set-top measuring system that adversely affect live sports events. For example, Rentrak is not able to measure games that run beyond their scheduled time slot, so highly rated overtime periods do not get measured.
Some network executives also question whether Rentrak’s TV measuring service continues to measure programming when a television is off but a set-top box remains on. Rentrak said it has started to roll out a system that does not measure programming in that situation.
Rentrak launched a political division in 2011 that the Obama campaign used to more specifically target TV advertising for swing voters. For example, in one swing state, Rentrak data persuaded the Obama campaign to buy advertising on 1 a.m. repeats of “The Insider” and afternoon episodes of “Judge Joe Brown,” according to a 2013 New York Times story, because it found that those shows rated highly among “persuadable voters.”
In the current election cycle, most of the presidential candidates are using Rentrak data, its executives said, though it would not say which ones.
“Sports is the next evolution for Rentrak,” Warech said.
