The NBA is the most powerful sponsorship platform in sport, according to the November POWA Index, which ranks sports clubs, leagues and events based on 60 unique data sets and 2.4 trillion daily data points.
The POWA Index Top 20 shows that the NBA takes #1 ahead of Spanish soccer giants Barcelona and Real Madrid, the NFL (#4), English Premier League (#5) and Manchester United (#6).
But while the Top 20 paints a fascinating top line picture of the relative impact of sports’ biggest brands, it tells only a small part of the POWA Index story.
Since its launch in October, the POWA Index continues to develop scope and functionality as it enhances its growing reputation among sports industry stakeholders. As the world’s first data-driven, real-time sports sponsorship valuation engine it is designed to put sports properties, sponsors, brands and consultants in the driving seat by delivering more accessible and affordable independent data. It enables rights-holders to identify how to maximise their income from sponsorship properties, allows brands to negotiate better deals and shows agencies which properties deliver the most value for their clients.
Delivered via an easily-understandable dashboard, the POWA Index’s functionality has been enhanced by enabling users to download raw data to create their own bespoke reports and graphs.
Other developments include the latest commercial news links by team, league and event from trusted media sources, a new sentiment graph ranking of the Top 5 players based on their contribution to a team or league’s POWA Index, and a POWA Index for individual countries to provide a domestic view as required.
The process that produces the POWA Index begins by crawling trillions of data points across 60 unique data sets including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, sports media sites, broadcast output and financial information.
The resulting data is cleaned and categorised before being analysed using advanced machine learning to produce output streams delivered via real-time personalised dashboards that allow users to access, interrogate and compare the information as and when they require it.
Its the breadth of information offered by the POWA index, together with the ability to make comparisons between different types of properties – such as clubs and leagues – that makes it such a valuable tool.
The result is a service which enables those working in sponsorship to identify the properties which are the best fit to help them reach their objectives at the right price.
It is designed to overcome any residual element of the ‘hit and hope’ approach to sponsorship still evident across the sector. And price points have been set to make it accessible to all sponsorship sector srtakeholders.
Mike Flynn, chief executive of DataPOWA, which operates the POWA Index from offices in London and New York, said: “We see the POWA Index as providing the industry standard for benchmarking the value of sponsorships. As such it helps all stakeholders better understand what properties and relationships work best for them.
“It is a very different product and different package from those offered by the major media monitoring and analysis companies.
“Our customers know their own business better than we ever can, so they are the experts…we are just providing a service which puts information at their fingertips and enables them to make comparisons and ask the right questions before making a decision.”
The information delivered by the POWA Index is critical to brands looking to identify the properties which will best deliver the engagement and audiences they need to reach and to do so at the right price. It allows them to compare the sponsorship performances not only of sports teams but to look at those against events and leagues so that they have all the information they need to make a decision.
Agencies that advise brands can use the POWA Index to make better recommendations to their clients. The index can also guide their in-depth research and strategic thinking, allowing them to provide a better service by broadening the scope of their search for suitable properties.
The POWA Index also enables properties themselves, both to compare their own performance as a sponsorship platform against their immediate competitors and to highlight of opportunities by showing the areas in which they are over- or under-performing.
DataPOWA also offers a competitively-priced sponsorship valuation service – their data team utilises the POWA index database & desk research to develop a virtual marketplace. This guarantees an accurate assessment of the monetary market value of the sponsorship property.
“Using our top down POWA Index data-driven valuation, we have already made comparisons against four other valuations, within two days we found ourselves less than five per cent from the valuations created by behemoth sponsorship agencies that took over four weeks to compile and cost eight to ten times the price of ours,” Flynn explained.
“Together with all the other reference and comparison points delivered by the POWA index, this gives users the ability to negotiate deals more effectively.”
Flynn believes the POWA Index can change the sponsorship industry by making everybody working in it better informed. Its low price point puts timely, decision-critical information in the hands of all stakeholders in the sponsorship process, helping reduce the reliance on hunches and educated guesswork that has, to date, been an inevitable part of the process.
“This sort of information has never before been so widely available,” he said.
To arrang a POWA index demo, email hello@powaindex.com