Listen to the episode at the Bloomberg Business of Sports Podcast.
[TRANSCRIPT]
This is Bloomberg Business of Sports with Michael Barr, Scarlet Fu, and Mike Lynch from Bloomberg Radio
MB: This is the Bloomberg Business of Sports show, where we explore the big money issues in the world of sports. I’m Michael Barr,
SF: I’m Scarlet Fu,
ML: and I’m Mike Lynch,
MB: And today we are talking big money. I mean big, big, big, big money, with Super Bowl ads more expensive than ever. Let’s break down the big winners of the night with Hive Enterprise AI President, Dan Calpin. Dan, welcome to the podcast.
MB: First of all, there were a lot of ads out there, but it seems to me the one that really dominated, and caught my eye because I’m an old man, looked like an old pong game. And I didn’t get it at first, but I guess it was like for Coinbase or something?
DC: Hi and thanks for having me. And yeah, that will probably go down in history as maybe the best direct response ad ever put on television. That was definitely a fun one.
SF: You’re referring to the one with the QR code, where people kind of stared at it and couldn’t believe that it was still on 15 seconds later and finally took a picture of it and decided they needed to do something about it. What does that say about advertisers’ need to rely on star power? Because when I was watching the ads, which I enjoyed, I saw a lot of big names – Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlet Johansson, Lebron James, the Joneses, the various Joneses – and I couldn’t remember what company they were advertising for. I just remember seeing them and thought that it was really funny, but I couldn’t tell you which company made the pickup truck that Leslie Jones, Rashida Jones, and Tommy Lee Jones were driving for.
DC: It’s a great point, Scarlet. And I think different brands have different approaches for both what they’re trying to achieve with their ads, but also who they’re trying to connect with, and I think so much of the value of the commercial isn’t, anymore, just the 30 or 60 seconds that you’re in the program itself, but all of the amplification before and after on social media, cetera. I think the other opportunity though that you bring up is, if I were to say “What is the headphone sponsor of the NFL?” or “Which company produces the jerseys?,” I bet all three of you or the folks out in the audience would know that, and that’s the angle that we at Hive and our partners at Elevate Sports Ventures covered looking at yesterday’s game, which moved beyond the traditional ad – the 15 and 30 seconds – and actually looked at the brands that were exposed in the content. And that’s a massive amount of value. So we ended up estimating that there’s north of 170 million dollars of value generated inside the game from the brands that were exposed during yesterday’s telecast, excluding commercials.
ML: Hey Dan, this is Mike Lynch in Boston. I’m fascinated at all this data that you people have accumulated over here. So are you saying that maybe going forward that the best return might not be that 30 or 50 second spot?
DC: I think the interesting thing with marketing is, unlike the game where they’re one winner on the field, there’s lots of brands that can claim victory, and depending on what you’re looking for, there’s different ways to connect with your audience and get value from the game. But with traditional commercials, those have been understood and well-measured for decades, and the opportunity that we see with sponsorship and branded content is that it represents billions of dollars of investments, but historically there’s never been a consistent or scalable way to measure that. Most brands have looked at, kind of, whistle-to-whistle measurement, from the time a game starts to the time a game ends, but no one really has put all those pieces together to truly value how much that exposure is worth, both across brands, but also across every second of every program of television or other types of media.
MB: We’re talking with Dan Calvin with Hive Enterprise. The prices of a Super Bowl ad on TV are just going up and up and up and up and it is not going to stop. The NFL obviously is king, and as long as they have a product – and a great product that they have delivered so far this season that has just ended – the ads are going to continue to climb.
DC: Yeah, I think that’s right. In general, brands want to be associated with both where audiences are and where they find value with the content, and I think the NFL and live sports in general will always be a place that brands find heavily-engaged audiences and value in associating. And I think in the same way that, if you were to go to an electronics store and wanted to find a good set of headphones, very likely if you’ve watched NFL games Bose would be in your consideration set, because every Sunday and, you know, every Thursday and Monday, you’re exposed to that brand within the game that you love, and if it’s good enough for your coaches to hear, there’s probably that presumption that it’s good enough for you.
SF: So now that you collect all this data from companies that have brand exposure in the actual game rather than during the commercial breaks, what is the takeaway for some of the smaller companies who may not have the budget to do their traditional advertising, but have an opportunity to be part of the game itself, the content itself? What is the takeaway for them in coming Super Bowls or live sports events?
DC: It’s a great question Scarlet, and I think that our friends that Elevate Sports Ventures who we published the report along with today work with brands and right holders on this question every day. And I think if you think of the question which is as simple as, “I want to be a part of the NFL,” there’s a lot of different ways you can do that. You can buy an ad in an NFL game. You could be an official league sponsor like a Microsoft or a Gatorade or a Bose. You could be a team sponsor at any of the local stadiums. Or you could be a broadcast sponsor with NBC and CBS and Fox. And so I think increasingly, with those options, you actually need data to make those choices. And so for us at Hive, being able to produce the data that isn’t just whistle-to-whistle measurement on where your brand is, but actually the landscape of sponsorship and branded content more broadly – being able to put a value on how much that is worth helps companies like Elevate work with their clients to able to make better decisions that are more informed with data.
ML: So Dan, some of these exposures are pretty much by accident. Let’s say there’s a bumper shot. We’re going to commercial break and they go outside and there’s a drone or a blimp that’s showing and you see “SoFi, SoFi, SoFi” all over the place. That’s just bonus on top of what they pay for the naming rights, correct?
DC: It’s a good question. I don’t know if it’s necessarily – or said differently, it’s not necessarily committed in contracts, but you can bet that SoFi I think paid 625 million dollars for 30 year naming rights and a big piece of that was knowing that that brand would be front and center on screen with obviously a game like yesterday being the largest exposure. SoFi is actually an interesting story. Given the profile of both the beautiful stadium in Los Angeles, but also all of the funds that went into naming it, if you look at the exposure that SoFi got during the game yesterday whistle-to-whistle, it was actually only about a third of what last year’s stadium naming rights sponsor Raymond James received in Tampa. And to your point Mike, I think that you can’t control that perfectly, but what’s actually really interesting, and I think probably the most compelling part of the data set and platform that we built, is that there’s no doubt that SoFi is going to be a winner from this week. We’ve already seen it with all the pre-game game coverage where not just sports, but news and entertainment are broadcasting outside of the stadium and essentially presenting a billboard for SoFi. And so that ability, even if it’s not specifically committed, but to be able to understand and value how much equivalent media value you’re getting from sponsorship placement – for brands, can help them essentially both measure your return on investment and return on objectives, but also pay the right amount of money and help make those decisions. And then for the rights holder, if you know how much value is being created from your asset, even if it’s not specifically what you’ve committed to delivering, that can actually help inform how you price your assets.
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MB: Is it a mistake for advertisers to show off their ad online before you see it on the Super Bowl? Because part of the excitement of seeing the ads is that hey, I want to see it debuted, but sometimes it sneaks over onto certain websites and it kind of takes the luster away from it. Am I right or am I wrong?
DC: I think the answer is probably in the respective brand. The challenge with the Super Bowl, and especially with commercials, even though they’re kind of a second game in and of themselves, there’s still lots of brands competing for attention, and you’re counting on that one 30-second moment in time to be able to capture the attention of the world. And so the benefit of pre-releases and post-releases is that it creates reach and exposure so that you have more opportunities to meet folks, but I think there’s a broader, interesting point of, if you’re kind of placing your bet on exposure on those 30 seconds, that does key up again the value in relative terms of sponsorship placement. So if you look at yesterday’s game, the top 8 brands by duration, if you take commercials and/or time in the game, actually didn’t air a commercial in the game. So if you take a brand like Nike, they had a cumulative amount of minutes that were more than 46 minutes of duration, that there were swooshes on jerseys, on sleeves, on gloves, and if you go down the list, I think in total we had 8 or 9 brands had more than a minute of exposure. And obviously you don’t have the sight and sound in a theater of telling a commercial, but if you think of opportunities to associate your brand with the NFL and just be top of mind with the world’s audience, there’s a really compelling opportunity with sponsorships and branded content.
SF: Do companies reach out to you to say or to ask, “How can I be the next Nike to affiliate myself, align myself more closely with the NFL?“
DC: Yeah, so at Hive, our business is really focused. So one step back – we’re predominantly a technology company in the AI space. Hive helps companies use AI to interpret video, image, text, and audio, and historically clients have built their own solutions around our technology for a diverse set of use cases, whether that’s out of domain, like content moderation for social networks, or content-based ad targeting for video publishers. And part of our focus over the last couple of years has been selectively building an application for ourselves for select use cases. And in this space specifically, we saw a market where the adoption of quote unquote AI was early, and the demand for data and insights AI produced was very underserved. And so the media and advertising industry broadly was an area that we saw opportunity in, and within it, sports sponsorship was an area that was ripe for disruption – historically characterized by very ad hoc and mostly manual measurement, which was frustrating clients who would have to wait weeks long for data and still only have part of the picture. And so we took our core technologies of world-class logo detection, object detection, speech-to-text models as building blocks, and then actually set up our own content ingestion pipeline so that we could feed always-on data into those models, and then built out a point-and-click platform to put more comprehensive and granular data in the hands of brands, agencies, and right holders. So today we work with a broad and diverse set of rights holders and TV networks like Disney, some of the world’s largest and most active brands and sponsorships like Anheuser Busch or Walmart, and a whole host agencies and consultancy partners, including Elevate sports Ventures who we published last night’s report with, who can kind of take our data, but then use that with their clients to turn it into really actionable insights.
ML: Dan, can you put a value on the promotional spots run by NBC last night promoting Peacock and primetime shows –
SF: Oh, good question.
ML: – their newscasts I saw were promoted, the Olympics, and anything else that’s going to run – and Telemundo? You know, they’re giving up 7 million dollars every 30 seconds to run a promotional spot for which they receive no monetary value immediately, but is there a long term uptick for them?
DC: It’s a great question, and that’s always the opportunity cost of promotional units is, the opportunity to advantage your own platform versus to realize revenue. I think historically – and it has probably only become even more the case in a streaming world with Peacock and Disney Plus and HBO Max – but many shows launched through the Super Bowl. And historically – you know, last night NBC let us see the Olympics – but for many decades, networks have taken their biggest bets on essentially the show that follows the Super Bowl. So it’s a delicate balance between what you sell versus what you use, but definitely something that creates value either way.
MB: Dan Calpin who is with Hive Enterprise. Dan, you are just full of knowledge when it comes to advertising, and I appreciate you for just taking the time out and giving me a good education. We appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dan.
DC: Thank you so much. Appreciate talking with you all and enjoyed the game last night and fun to get to extend it into Monday morning.
MB: Thank you. This is the Bloomberg Business of Sports Podcast, catch us here each and every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, exploring the world of money and sports.
