Nielsen impact score expands to deliver new marketing performance insights for professional sports teams and brands

Nielsen Impact Score Pro enables teams and brands to maximize marketing and sponsorship investment opportunities in highly competitive environment

NEW YORK – May 31, 2022 – Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN) announced the expansion of its Nielsen Impact Score service to cover the most popular North American professional sports leagues, changing the game for the sports sponsorship industry. Teams in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS can now benefit from Nielsen Impact Score (NIS) Pro, enabling organizations to benchmark the relative sponsorship value of their properties and assets to make data-informed cases to brands for marketing and sponsorship investment. The New York Mets are the first professional sports team to sign on and will use NIS Pro to strengthen their local and national sponsorship sales strategy.

NIS Pro provides professional teams and rights holders in some of the world’s biggest sports leagues with clear, holistic views of their properties to inform smarter sponsorship sales activities and packaging strategies. Alternatively, the tool provides brands access to cross-league benchmarks spanning critical sports marketing KPIs, allowing those brands to optimize their sponsorship selections and portfolios. For example, NIS Pro can help brands evaluate how their portfolio may perform in top markets across sports, providing competitive insights on how investment in an NHL team in the Conference Finals may perform compared to an MLS team at midseason.

Nielsen Sports, a global leader in sports media valuation, data intelligence, strategy and insights, first launched the Nielsen Impact Score in fall 2021 to showcase the marketing impact collegiate men’s basketball teams could deliver to potential student-athletes. NIS coverage has been expanded to major collegiate football programs and its scope has been further enhanced to meet a broader range of entities. Tapping Nielsen’s industry-leading TV measurement tools, along with its local market research data from Nielsen Scarborough and Nielsen Fan Insights, NIS is a first-of-its-kind solution that only Nielsen can deliver.

“Sports teams playing in some of the world’s most popular leagues are able to effectively engage massive audiences and deliver marketing messages on behalf of brands like no other properties,” said Jon Stainer, Nielsen Sports Managing Director, Americas. “NIS Pro is uniquely capable of delivering data analytics solutions that provide benchmarking and intelligence to back up decision making by teams and brands at the highest level of sports.”

The Nielsen Impact Score Pro solution provides the following:

• Information database featuring team-level metrics for every team in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS
• Sponsor exposure benchmarks by team, asset, and season
• Viewership trends per game, team, sport, and season segment
• Fan affinity benchmarks including fan counts and key demographics
• Social media engagement metrics by platform, team, and league
• Benchmarks by league, designated market area, and across all major professional sports leagues

NIS Pro will give the Mets, who are located in the country’s largest media market along with many popular professional franchises, the ability to compare and contrast across sports and employ strategic decision making to benefit both the organization and their partners. The tool provides comparative and contextual positioning, insights to optimize the organization’s rate card and allows the Mets to measure their properties across key marketing KPIs against local and national competitors.

NIS Pro provides the necessary contextual insights to inform buying and selling strategies within the major North American professional sports sponsorship market. The tool includes asset performance rankings for every team which allows brands to identify and maximize their sponsorship exposure.

Learn more about the Nielsen Impact Score at https://content.nielsen.com/2022/NISPro.

Nielsen Sports is a leading source of sports and sponsorship measurement and analytics around the world, with solutions spanning cross-platform media valuation, fan insights, and digital and social analysis. Nielsen Sports provides insight and analysis of over 15,000 teams, leagues and events and for more than 150,000 brands globally. Learn more at nielsensports.com.