Top 25 Most Innovative Sponsors in Sports
After identifying a need in the marketplace for a benchmark that eliminates subjectivity from the process of determining what makes a sponsor innovative, Sports Innovation Lab has developed an algorithm-based report that uniquely ranks global brands according to how effectively they demonstrate their ability to win the future fan - the Fluid Fan.
Our Innovation Score Methodology
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We believe that innovative sponsors focus on building communities, not just audiences. The Community Strength metric measures the ways that brands facilitate and grow
their consumer communities. In particular, the method pays close attention to efforts that allow communication between multiple consumers and community events centered around an experience, the brand, and sport.
We track how teams are building and setting the foundation for owned communities.
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We believe that innovative sponsors generate market energy. The Brand Energy metric measures fans’ interest in the brand over time. This metric combines social media metrics and search behaviors in a sports context
to estimate the brand’s overall energy or buzz. Social media metrics are not solely based on the sponsors accounts, but rather we explore how the brand shows up in the social conversations hosted by sports entities—teams, leagues, and athletes.
We track the slope of conversation and implied interest in sponsors by fans.
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We believe that innovative sponsors must lean into the creative use of technology and become empowered with emerging consumer behavior trends. The Emerging Tech metric is a measure of how sponsors are leveraging
new tech in sports partnerships and platforms. The emerging technologies for 2021 were: Mixed- Reality, NFTs, The Metaverse, Sustainability, Smartphone Technology, and Data Collection.
We track how sponsors test, learn, and deploy the technologies that enable Fluid Fan behaviors.
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We continuously collect multiple streams of publicly available data on teams, from press releases, news reports, team websites, LinkedIn, and other freely available sources aggregating and algorithmically processing that data into three discrete metrics.