Ian Mallon: Chasing the Tiger – Will Rory ever be PGA's biggest brand?
ANY CHANCE? Rory McIlroy. Pic: AP Photo/Martin Dokoupil
WHEN the PGA Tour announced at the end of the season that Rory McIlroy did not win its $100m Player Impact Programme (PIP) - despite winning its Tour Championship and returning to world number one - The Pitch asked the US tour to explain the metrics.
Yes, it admitted, Rory’s $12m second prize came in a year which saw him “maintain such a high level of excellence for a whole” season.
His FedEx Cup win (doing the same in Europe by winning the DP World’s Race to Dubai), 10 Top 10 finishes at 16 PGA Tour events – second at The Masters - and $8.6m in prize money was surely enough to win PIP’s $15m winner’s purse – ahead of an uncompetitive Tiger.
After all, Woods has barely played, completing just nine rounds of golf at the Masters, PGA Championship and The Open - featuring outside the top 40 in the ‘most watched on TV’ segment.
PGA Tour’s Senior VP of Data and Technology Solutions, Mike Vitti, sat with The Pitch to go through the five criteria he uses to assess a player’s impact, and the stats guru went on to reveal significant changes to this methodology for the season ahead.
Vitti used five data points to rank this year’s PIP – 1) Nielsen Brand Exposure – TV coverage 2) Google Search Data 3) Media Mentions (press coverage - Meltwater) 4) MVP Index – social media score 5) Q Score, a player’s general awareness amongst US population.
Tiger was the highest ranked in internet searches, media mentions, awareness and on social media – while Rory featured third in Google, second in media coverage, second in awareness and 11th in social media.
The only area where Rory finished ahead of Tiger was in the live broadcast numbers – taken on the final two days of competition - finishing fifth versus the American’s 41st rating – Scottie Scheffler was top.
Now you begin to see a picture of that enduring Tiger appeal, and why Rory ‘struggles’ a little in certain areas.
“Rory’s won 23 times on tour… that’s now three FedEx Cups – ‘unprecedented,” explains Vitti.
“To me the FedEx Cup is just… when you think about the performance to win all season - the Majors are the pinnacle as an event - but to win that (Tour) championship across a whole season, you have to maintain such a high level of excellence for a whole year, and people appreciate that.”
So how does Tiger maintain those levels of interest despite playing only 81 holes in competition?
“That’s why we use five data points, so there’s different aspects of how you are impacting and getting fans to engage,” Vitti adds.
“People still search for Tiger – ‘When’s he going to come back?’, ‘Is he in the field this week?’, ‘He was practising’ – he posted a video when he was just hitting golf balls that millions and millions of people were watching and were clicking-in just to watch him hit golf balls.
“He caddied for his son in a tournament and it generated a bunch of news, so you have news coverage globally for him, you have searches still going on, he has the largest social media following. And people know who he is.
“He’s the most well-known person in sport, almost, even in the US.
“He’s up there with a LeBron James, so that awareness of his name resonates everywhere – that’s why we use five factors and he’s still driving engagement in the sport.”
Not that there’s a flaw in the system, or that the data is not accurate – Tiger is Tiger, after all – the PGA Tour is aiming for even more consistent metrics this season with the introduction of two new criteria to replace the MVP and Q Score.
A more frequent surveying monitor will now be used, measuring the awareness of a player amongst the general US sports population and the golfer’s recognition by specific core golf fans.
So how is PIP scoring assessed as a single number from multiple data sources – all from third party providers?
Vitti explains that metrics are gathered and weighted equally, converted and normalised before being combined into scores on a ‘zero to one’ scale for each category.
Therefor the final results for this year’s Programme had Tiger on top with a score of 0.9594 with Rory at 0.9129, Jordan Spieth (3rd), Justin Thomas (4th), Jon Rahm (5th) with Scheffler making up the top 6 – Shane Lowry finished 12th, with a $3m prize.
So, is the $12m that Rory pocketed for coming second, the dollar value of his brand-worth to the PGA Tour?
“I wouldn’t frame it in that way, what we’re really looking at is engagement, we’re not looking at visibility but more about his impact on the PGA Tour – and he’s obviously had a massive impact,” adds Mike Vitti.
AN AVERAGE of 80% of football fans will browse social media or use an app during a game, new results to coincide with the Qatar World Cup have revealed.
The study stated that for big brand, broadcasters and platforms “there are even more possibilities to integrate sponsors or timely match data on multiple platforms – even directly monetising what’s happening on-field”.
“It’s a firm grasp of fans’ interest and media behaviours during the game to inform how brands show up, which messages resonate and how broadcasters and platforms should deliver insights,” said the Nielsen ‘What Fans Want: 2022 World Football Report’.
One brand that is building a business based on fans’ interests and greater integration with supporters is Irish Football Fan TV, which has taken an unconventional approach to business.
Paul Nealon, founder of the platform - which has achieved 52 million impressions across Twitter and YouTube, and approximately 200 million impressions on all other social media – is now looking at growing, ahead of the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
“I’ve probably done it backwards from a business point of view, built the brand and trust, and only now am I looking at the money side of things to grow and drive that on,” he explained.
Nealon is actively looking for investors and “the right type of sponsors” to come on board to help with that upward journey.
“The brand is there, players and supporters know about it and are engaged with it, but I need it to kick on now, particularly as we head into Australia and New Zealand,” he explained.
Nealon set up the platform in 2017, on the back of the content-generation phenomenon that was Euro 2016, where he analysed how quality clips generated by fans, for fans, had a fully engaged and active audience.
His channel is now a trusted brand for Irish players, where stars like Seamus Coleman and Shane Duffy know they can go to speak directly to supporters, but not with the formality of official FAI channels.
That was best highlighted this year when an interview with an out-of-favour Aaron Connolly revealed a new level of maturity, which U21 manager Jim Crawford saw, and brought the player into his squad.
It’s a different sort of maturity that Paul Nealon is now searching for as he attempts to bring Irish Football Fan TV to the next level.
Four third=level colleges added to athletic elite
AN ADDITIONAL four universities and colleges will join six additional academies as part of Sport Ireland’s Institute Accreditation for Student Athlete Support (ASAS) programme.
The scheme offers additional ‘best practice’ supports for those trying to juggle academic schedules with busy training regimes - through the provision of equal opportunity accreditations for athletes to combine training and education.
Dublin City University and Ulster University were given full accreditation status, while the National College of Ireland and University of Galway have been named affiliates.
They join an inaugural group of six schools awarded accreditation earlier in 2022 – University College Cork, Queens University Belfast, Setanta College, Technological University Dublin, University of Limerick along with Trinity College Dublin (Affiliate level).
