Nielsen Launches Nielsen Impact Score To Help Demonstrate The Marketing Value Of Athletic Programs To Student-Athletes

Source: Nielsen

As a result of the NCAA's decision to allow college athletes to monetize their name, image, and likeness in July, Nielsen has launched Nielsen Impact Score, a new marketing value index that helps demonstrate the marketing value of athletic programs.

Through Nielsen's industry-leading TV measurement tools and local marketing research, the NIS evaluates athletic programs based on three key factors:

• National Exposure – The basis for any marketing deal, this metric accounts for how much national television exposure the collegiate program provides its student-athletes. This metric is based on proprietary Nielsen TV ratings data.

• Local Market Impact – College sports marketing relies heavily on state and local market advertisers, and this metric quantifies how a program’s local market fanbase engages with its local marketing activations. This component is provided using local market research data from Nielsen Scarborough.

• Social Media Engagement – This calculates the engagement value of a program’s social media audience through metrics including followers, engagement rates, and more.

These factors enable Nielsen to provide athletic programs with a NIS score as well as other metrics that evaluate how their programs compare to others across various areas including marketability, exposure, earning potential, and other factors that benefit student-athletes.

NIS provides coaches with a data-driven approach to pitching recruits on the NIL opportunities that their particular program can provide them.

Until July, student-athletes mostly focused on factors such as scholarship money, program prestige, coaching, facilities, and school location when deciding what college to take their talent to, but with July’s launch of NIL policy, student-athletes are now considering the impact a school can have on them when it comes to off the field opportunities.

With a small percentage of student-athletes going on to play professionally in their respective sports, students-athletes being able to capitalize on their personal brands throughout their college careers and beyond is becoming important especially since society embraces more non-traditional career paths these days.

The NIL era is still in its very early stages, but so far, it has proven to be a great opportunity for student-athletes of all sizes and levels.

Nielsen's launch of NIS is likely to be the first of many NIL-related measurement solutions and tools, especially as more companies, platforms, and initiatives are launched to support and student-athlete branding and monetization.

The NIS is currently available for over 100 NCAA Division I men's college basketball and over 100 college football programs across conferences including the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), Big 12, Big East, Ben Ten, Pac-12, Southeastern Conference (SEC), and others.