WPP Media beefs up its sports insights prowess with new partnership with Genius Sports

By pairing Genius Sports’ first-party audience insights with WPP’s own data resources, the partnership is creating an exclusive “Brand Sports Momentum Score” that measures fan acquisition, retention, and spend against brand-specific audiences, which will help WPP Media guide its clients to finding less obvious audiences in sports that might fall outside the major tentpoles — and get closer to delivering on outcomes. 

“This intelligence is going to be able to deliver different results than what maybe we would have had when we were only utilizing third-party data,” said Marty Blich, executive director, head of U.S. sports investment & partnership at WPP Media. “It’s about getting smarter. It’s about getting more effective. It’s about getting faster and actionable on what we do.”

The sports marketplace has been red hot for more than a year, having played a big role in last year’s upfront. While a specific sports ad revenue figure is hard to come by, sports is expected to contribute heavily to the more than $1 trillion in ad spend expected this year. 

In many ways, that’s thanks to the big tentpoles of sports — the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the World Cup and the major sports leagues. But as Blich pointed out, the scorecard WPP Media is forming via the Genius partnership will help drive clients to perhaps lesser-known sports that may be overdelivering on a particular audience. Hypothetically, if World Cup soccer is too expensive for advertiser X, perhaps the World Cup of cricket, or a rugby league could deliver similar audiences.

“This is about actually having a media strategy — utilizing this data and applying it to a media strategy that’s 360 all year round,” he said. “This isn’t just about how do I use this for the World Cup, or the Olympics. It’s really about, how do I take this and create a real, true sports strategy utilizing first party data.”

For its part, Genius Sports believes it’s giving WPP Media a head start against its competition — although the major holdcos, including Publicis, have all made investments of late. “Static metrics can’t keep up with how fans behave or how brands need to act,” said Josh Linforth, chief revenue officer, Genius Sports, in a statement. “By powering WPP Media’s proprietary fandom and momentum scores with league, team and transactional data, we are giving brands a real time, outcome focused view of fandom inside their planning workflow.”

Blich said WPP Media is talking with clients about what the partnership can deliver now, but acknowledged it won’t likely be applicable to last-minute purchases in the Olympics.