For the ninth consecutive season, quarterback Peyton Manning has led the Indianapolis Colts into the AFC playoffs. But as the team gears up to play the New York Jets on Saturday, Manning not only enters the game with a career-high in passing and the second-most completions in National Football League history, but also the highest N-Score of quarterbacks in the playoffs, according to The Nielsen Company.
N-Score, a new measurement tool from Nielsen developed in collaboration with E-Poll Market Research, an innovative consumer research firm specializing in the evaluation and measurement of celebrities, brands and media properties. The N-Score rates the brand impact of professional athletes and sports personalities to enable advertisers to make strong marketing decisions on commercial endorsements. Currently, N-Score is available for more than 1,000 individuals on both a national basis and 30 local markets. N-Score gauges the effects of positive and negative news about athletes and sports personalities. Polls are fielded regularly as news or events warrant), with data going back eight years. The data can be broken out by age, sex, and demographic compositions to help marketers identify the most effective endorsers to audience segments.
With an N-Score of 262Manning ranked top among playoff quarterbacks, followed by the New Orleans Saints’ Drew Brees (166) and the New England Patriots’ Tom Brady (131). Philadelphia quarterback Michael Vick, the football comeback story of the year, had a national N-Score of just 16, reflecting lingering public displeasure with his conviction on dog fighting charges.
“N-Score represents the latest step in Nielsen’s ongoing commitment to comprehensively measuring consumer engagement and providing advertisers and marketers an important new tool to make more informed and more precise decisions,” said Stephen Master, Vice President, Nielsen Sports. “By combining our research and expertise, which segments consumers by demographic attributes, and E-Poll’s industry-leading surveys about the value of celebrity endorsers, we’ve created a currency by which sporting figures’ effectiveness as endorsers can be measured and trended.”
About N-Score
The N-Score is derived from a model that factors in audience awareness of an athlete, the overall appeal of the athlete and 46 specific personal attributes such as leadership and trustworthiness. The national survey is administered to more than 1,100 people in the U.S. and the sample is representative of the general population based on gender, income, age and education.
