Super bowl LI has come and gone with the Patriots winning one of the best comebacks in history, but the work of brands & agencies is only beginning. The largest TV viewing audience just saw dozens of new ads from familiar brands. With the multimillion-dollar investments across TV ads and in-game sponsorships, agencies and brands want to know “did ads influence consumer behavior? Did these ads drive further foot traffic to stores?"
In our last post, we looked at where Patriots and Falcons fans shopped across competing team territories. Taking that a step further, we wanted to know which brands won fans over - before and after the game - on both a local and national level.
Methodology
At Skyhook, our location network gives us access to massive amounts of highly precise mobile device data. This data provides insights into anonymized behaviors of mobile users as they move throughout their day.
For the pregame analysis, since no team’s fan bases map naturally to geographical boundaries such as cities or states, we began by defining the areas that best represented Patriots and Falcons loyalty territories. Homing devices to team-attributed counties or areas where fans have opted into team updates allowed us to create complex geographic polygons defining these “fanscapes”.
We can then gather all of the device IDs belonging to Falcons and Patriots-assigned fanscapes and ran these respective groups through our Skyhook Personas. Skyhook Personas are built by calculating how millions of mobile phones and other devices interact with millions of commercial places of business every day. This process calculates brand affinities amongst fans based on where the devices have visited stores and other commercial businesses.
In our postgame analysis coming up next, we'll look at how ads drove foot traffic to stores across the nation. We'll be observing device IDs throughout the US and those seen at the Stadium for 2 weeks to see how in-game ad sponsorships performed. Subscribe to our blog in order to be among the first to receive follow-up insights on our findings.
As for Super Bowl fan bases before the game, here’s what we found:
Brand Preferences
Before the game, here’s how brands compared between Patriots and Falcons fans:
Historically, team territories showed interesting car-buying trends: Falcons area prefered US cars such as Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and Jeep while Patriots prefer foreign-made such as Honda, Hyundai and Audi.
Falcons territory had more casual diners that dine at Arby’s (5X more likely than Patriots fans), Longhorn Steakhouse, Pizza Hut, Chik-fil-A (2X) and IHOP. Patriots area fans were more likely to be seen at Chipotle, Panera or Sbarro and were (unsurprisingly) 4X as likely to get coffee from Dunkin Donuts.
Falcons territory dwellers prefer to shop at Sam’s Club and Costco for their bulk shopping needs while Patriots like BJ’s best. Local pharmacy preferences: CVS for Patriots territory and Walgreens for Falcons.
For additional fan preferences and demographics of those who engaged with brands before the game, see our previous post.
Bottom Line
Stay tuned for our follow-up post that reports our findings on how brand ads performed nation-wide 2-3 weeks post game. In the meantime, checkout some of our past analyses of mobile devices across the US here. Follow us on Twitter @Skyhook to see our recap on fan brand preferences based on ads shown throughout the game.
About Skyhook Personas
Skyhook helps brands, agencies and event organizers target their most relevant audiences and reach them with messages that speaks to their unique preferences. Our analysis above can be applied to any number of geographically defined events or regions. This method is also used to measure the impact of campaign messaging on in-store foot traffic for retailers or any brick & mortar brand.
