Seven years ago, Tomes Auto Group changed its approach to advertising.
“We decided we only wanted TV commercials with sporting events, because people are being called in; their eyeballs are glued to the screen,” said Brandon Tomes, president of Tomes Auto Group and its Texas dealers.
Today, sports marketing remains an important way to reach consumers. Live sports are the crown jewel of television: the most watched, most valuable programming and the most powerful place to advertise. According to Nielsen, sports accounted for 98% of the 50 most-watched programs on U.S. television in 2021.1
About 99% of viewers who watch sports watch them live or on the same day.2 It’s a reliable place for ‘appointment’ viewing – and a place where ads are seen, not skipped.
West Herr Auto Group in western New York state also knows the power of sports marketing. “As a marketer, you want to focus your efforts on consumer attention — and for many people, that’s a disproportionate interest in sports,” said Matt Lasher, West Herr’s director of marketing.
The auto group has signed a list of current and former professional football players to serve as local community ambassadors for its dealership. “People have a high emotional connection to sports,” Lasher says. “By hanging out with people they like, we get some of that good vibe.”
With many different ways to engage with fans, how can you maximize your investment in sports? How can you make sure your ads reach the fans you want to reach? The experts at Spectrum Reach suggest these best practices to get the most out of your sports marketing dollars:
Go multiscreen: Today the average American household has 25 connected devices, twice as many as two years ago.3 Sports fans watch their favorite teams and important games not only on the big screen in the living room, but also in the backyard on a laptop and on the go on tablets and phones – and sometimes on two screens at once. To ensure maximum range and maximum frequency, dealers must develop a multi-screen strategy that includes both linear and streaming TV. Adding streaming to a campaign that is only linear increases a campaign’s reach by 28%, according to research from Spectrum Reach.4
Broaden the Sports Offerings: While the “big four” professional sports are always a jumping-off point for advertisers, Americans have a seemingly bottomless appetite for sports.
Many sports are becoming more and more popular. For example, football outshines hockey with American viewers, especially with the Hispanic population.5 Dealers can seek out these and other less conspicuous but effective places to reach unique fans or reach avid sports consumers with extra frequency.
In addition to using professional athletes as ambassadors, student athletes can now negotiate endorsement deals, and dealers can also create distinctive and locally relevant campaigns around those athletes.
Better ad targeting: Today, marketers can buy TV ad time in the same way as digital ads on search engines, social media or websites. Rather than relying on demographics like men ages 25-54, impression-based metrics allow an advertiser to target audiences with a higher willingness to buy.
Spectrum Reach uses its aggregated and anonymized viewer data from first-party audiences and overlaps it with privacy-focused third-party car data. By doing this, it can be determined how different tastes in sports programs reveal different preferences about car brands.
Many dealers worked on faith and guts as they threw dollars at major sporting events on TV. They knew the ratings were there, but wondered what the ultimate impact was. The fragmentation of the media landscape has made it even more difficult to measure results consistently across ad platforms.
That makes it more important to work with partners who offer easy-to-use dashboards and solid attribution solutions. For example, Spectrum Reach has partnered with industry leaders in attribution (TV Squared) and data privacy (Blockgraph) to build a multi-screen attribution solution. Solutions like these can help advertisers dot the i’s and cross their t’s by linking both linear and streaming ad exposure to business outcomes such as website visits. This means dealers avoid ad waste.
The bottom line: Sports marketing is a powerful way to advertise and can be effective for dealers. Taking the time to follow these strategies and do it really well can help you get out of the park.
Spectrum Reach Automotive has local experts and an award-winning creative agency in more than 90 US markets with expertise in building data-driven multi-screen advertising campaigns that influence car buyers. Visit www.spectrumreach.com/auto for more information.
1 https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2022/driven-to-watch-how-a-sports-docuseries-drove-u-s-fans-to- Formula-1
2 Comscore National (Sports Genre) May 21-April 22, HHAA Delivered Live+SD
3 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-how-the-pandemic-stress-tested-the-increasingly-crowded-digital-home-301308718.html
4 Spectrum Reach AM campaign data. Date – 4th quarter ’20. R&D & Partner Affiliates.*Includes all campaigns with Streaming TV & Linear. Total campaigns – 5,758. *Streaming TV Lift – % of new HHs reached. **Results are based on averages, results vary and not all campaigns achieve +28% increase.
5 https://worldsoccertalk.com/2021/12/09/soccer-surpasses-nhl-as-4th-most-popular-sport-in-united-states/
