While anything can happen on gameday, your strategy shouldn’t be left to chance. That playbook is getting a rewrite.
GumGum Sports Media, powered by Relo Metrics, is built for the entire sports calendar, turning verified sports viewership and sponsorship exposure into addressable audiences brands can activate across digital media. From football and basketball to hockey, baseball, and beyond, marketers have new ways to connect fandom with what comes next.
At the heart of it are three ways to reach the fans that matter to your brand:
- Replay your biggest moments. Re-engage fans who were actually watching when your sponsorship appeared.
- Counterplay the competition. Reach fans exposed to a competitor’s sponsorship and turn their moment into your opportunity.
- Find your fans with Sports Audiences. Reach verified fans based on the sports and leagues they actually watch, rather than modeled interests or inferred fandom.
Kick Off NFL Season with a New Game Plan
Few cultural currents crash the mainstream quite like the kickoff to the NFL season. The rituals are locked in, fantasy lineups are tweaked within an inch of their lives, and millions of fans are ready to spend the next five months watching, debating, celebrating, and occasionally yelling at their television.
For marketers, that kind of attention creates an enormous opportunity. But winning the NFL season means thinking beyond kickoff, Thanksgiving, the playoffs, or even the moments when your logo appears on screen. Fandom doesn’t begin and end with the broadcast, and neither should your strategy.
Brands have spent billions getting access to the game. The bigger opportunity now is turning that investment, viewership, and fan engagement into something you can keep working with long after the clock hits zero.
And this season, there are more ways than ever to make every one of those moments count.
Replay: Make Your Sponsorship Work Overtime This NFL Season
NFL sponsorships are built for visibility. Your logo hits the screen, your brand gets its moment under the lights, and everyone celebrates the exposure. But there’s always been a pretty important question hiding behind all that exposure: who really saw it?
Tune-in alone can’t answer that. A VideoAmp analysis found that across sports, the median viewer sees just 34% of a broadcast. Fans tune in late, bounce between games, make a halftime food run, or spend Sunday afternoon trying to watch four games at once. “Watched the game” can cover a lot of ground. And it doesn’t mean they were watching when your sponsorship appeared.
Replay closes that gap by pinpointing when your brand appeared during the broadcast and matching those moments against verified viewership data to identify the households watching at that time. Instead of casting a net around everyone who tuned in, you can build an exposure-verified audience of the fans who saw you.
From there, one sponsorship moment can become the starting point for a much bigger campaign. Your logo may only get a few seconds on screen, but its job doesn’t have to end there. Re-engage those fans across web, CTV, and online video to reinforce your message, build recall, and give an audience already exposed to your brand another opportunity to act.
You already paid for the moment. Replay helps you make more of it.
Counterplay: Intercept the Competition
Your competitor landed the sponsorship. Their logo got the screen time. Their media team probably celebrated accordingly. Unfortunately for them, the audience is still very much in play.
Counterplay takes conquesting to the broadcast, identifying the fans who were watching when a competitor’s sponsorship appeared and turning that exposure into an audience your brand can reach. So while they may have paid to put their brand in the game, you have a new way to connect with the viewers on the other side of that investment.
And these aren’t fans pulled from a broad interest category. They’ve been exposed to a competing brand during the broadcast, creating an opportunity to reach an audience already primed within your category with a message of your own. Consider it your chance to force a turnover while the competition is driving consideration.
Picture the NFL season from that perspective. A competing sponsorship is no longer something you simply have to watch from the sidelines. Counterplay gives you another way in, whether you’re defending market share, introducing an alternative, or looking to get in front of consumers while the category is already top of mind.
From there, those audiences can extend across web, CTV, and online video, turning a competitor’s moment in the broadcast into another opportunity for your own campaign.
They paid for the sponsorship. Counterplay makes sure they don’t own the conversation.
Sports Audiences: Put Verified Fandom on Your Roster
Not every NFL strategy starts with a sponsorship. Sometimes the brief is refreshingly simple: we want football fans. But when everyone’s a fan come playoff time, how do you separate the fairweather crowd from the people putting in the hours every Sunday?
Sports Audiences knows who’s watching. Powered by VideoAmp’s deterministic viewership data, Sports Audiences lets brands build audiences based on the sports and leagues people watch, rather than modeled interests or inferred fandom. If NFL viewers are who you came for, start with verified NFL viewers.
And unlike Replay or Counterplay, there’s no sponsorship required to get started. Sports Audiences puts the audience itself at the center, giving brands a direct route into NFL fandom whether you’re launching a product, jumping into a cultural moment, or looking to reach the people who keep coming back week after week.
From there, take that verified audience across web, CTV, and online video, with the ability to layer GumGum’s contextual and mindset capabilities to make the strategy even more relevant.
No modeled fandom. No educated guesses. Just the viewers you came to reach.
There Is No Offseason
The NFL may be kicking things off, but the sports calendar never sits still. Hockey drops the puck. Basketball tips off. Baseball embarks on another 162-game marathon. There’s always another season starting, a rivalry heating up, or a must-see moment around the corner.
For marketers, the opportunity keeps moving too. GumGum Sports Media gives brands new ways to amplify sponsorship investments, conquest the competition, and reach verified viewers across the sports and leagues that matter most to them.
The NFL season is only the beginning. There is no offseason for fandom, and now your sports media strategy can keep pace.
Turn Fandom Into Your Advantage
From verified viewership to sponsorship amplification and competitive conquesting, GumGum Sports Media, powered by Relo Metrics, gives you more ways to connect with the audiences that matter.
{{cta-1}}
