The emergence of Rentrak Sports, which launched officially last week, will look to create a new player in the industry, leveraging the company’s array of TV measurement data, consumer data, and branded entertainment metrics to serve rising sports sponsorship trends that saw $20 billion spent in the US alone in 2014. With numbers at a premium, the division will look to tap into its data to offer sports companies services that range from local/national TV ratings subscriptions and ad effectiveness to media rights valuation and viewership analysis projects.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Tom Sommer, Managing Director of Rentrak Sports about the launch and how it will influence the industry in the years ahead.
Sommer on the launch: It has been a pretty exciting ride the last six months, getting a lot of word out there. We only really launched publically this past Monday. The desire from executives from throughout the sports marketing world for a different option to help them better understand their fans is out there, and there is an unquenchable thirst for data.
On the division: Rentrak’s linear television business is really only a few years old. I think the thought at Rentrak was how to take it to the next level, how do we work with teams, the brands and the agencies. How would they benefit from having a company like ours precisely measure viewership consumption as well as various other data overlays such as the types of cars they are driving, what type of products they buy and so forth. We are really the only shop that can do all that in a syndicated fashion.
On what makes their data unique: The way Rentrak pulls together its television data is that we work with and pull ratings directly from the set top boxes, drawing estimates from 32 million television sets. So it is a completely massive data set, there are no panels. Compared to the legacy ratings provider, it is substantially a larger sample size. The other thing that is different is that we measure all 210 DMAs, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, every single second. So if the guys from major League Baseball want to know how the All-Star Game did in Dubuque, Iowa, we are the only ones who offer that in a syndicated fashion. A lot of folks are interested in the sheer size of the sample that we offer and once they actually get in and have a meeting with us, they find out about a lot of the other unique things that we can give them and how we overlay that and match it to data sets.
Our branded entertainment offering is something that is very unique because we pull ratings directly from the set top box. When a guy backs up to make a great catch in front of a Budweiser sign, we can actually deliver the audience for that three seconds of airtime. That is a unique aspect that no one has been able to hone in on.
On sports fans: On Sports fans are crazy and they make incredible decisions based on fanhood and their allegiances. We feel that we are the only company they can help leagues and teams truly understand who the sports fan is and how they consume their content. I always find that there are a number of shops that are good at one or two things. We are good at a bunch of stuff. While our core offering is our ratings platform, on a local level, where traditionally teams or leagues have had to rely on a panel of a couple hundred households, we have tens to hundreds of households in every single DMA.
