Nielsen Impact Score to Measure Pro Sports Teams

Nielsen has expanded its Nielsen Impact Score service (NIS) to cover the most popular North American professional sports leagues. First up is the New York Mets baseball team, which will use the new 'NIS Pro' to guide its local and national sponsorship sales strategy.

Rolled out last October, NIS uses Nielsen's TV measurement tools, alongside local market research data from in-market consumer insights service Nielsen Scarborough, to help universities showcase the impact their programs can have on prospective players. In January, the NIS database added data from more than 100 college football programs.

The newly expanded and named NIS Pro solution offers a database featuring team-level metrics for every team in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS; enabling sponsor exposure to be benchmarked by team, asset and season. In addition, NIS Pro offers viewing trends per game, team, sport and season segment; fan affinity benchmarks including fan counts and key demographics; and social media engagement metrics by platform, team and league. The tool also provides brands with access to cross-league benchmarks spanning sports marketing KPIs.

Jon Stainer (pictured), Nielsen Sports MD, Americas, comments: '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. 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'.

Web site: www.nielsen.com .