Nielsen Fan Insights Boosts Coverage in Asia, Adds New Reporting and Crosstab Functionalities

Nielsen has unveiled new enhancements to its Fan Insights platform enabling sharper visibility into the interests, media consumption behaviors, brand attitudes, and purchasing habits of sports fans around the world.  Expanded country coverage, new reporting capabilities, and advanced Crosstab functionality provide global sports properties, brands, and event organizers with critical data and actionable insights to inform smarter decision-making around sponsorship, fan engagement, and media rights investment.

The Nielsen Fan Insights platform now includes data for 26 of the world’s most dynamic sports markets. Newly added in the latest product release are the six largest southeast Asian economies of Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. In addition, data for Australia, Canada, Mexico, Poland, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is also newly available. Already covered in the platform since 2019 are Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Spain, U.K and U.S.

Leveraging Nielsen Fan Insights data and intelligence, sponsors and brands can size potential audiences by various parameters and make decisions based on data. For instance, a brand could compare football fans to badminton fans in southeast Asian countries and drill into demographics, media consumption habits and other interests to determine which audience aligns best with their unique marketing objectives.

“In today’s global sports market, data and intelligence have the ability to provide a clear competitive advantage,” says Marco Nazzari, Managing Director, International at Nielsen Sports. “Nielsen Fan Insights makes the world’s most trusted data available through the industry’s most powerful connected platform resulting in highly actionable intelligence. In the high-stakes global sports sponsorship and marketing game in which clear understanding of fans is critical, it can serve as the winning edge.”

The latest product enhancement includes new Crosstab functionality which allows users to design and run customized queries against the Nielsen datasets integrated into Fan Insights. This feature opens up all new contingency table analysis capabilities for researchers tasked with gleaning critical insights from large data sets. Leveraging the power of Crosstabs, a sports rights holder such as an NFL team could source potential sponsors to pursue based on how likely their fans are to purchase a new car or switch mobile carriers within the next year. After identifying “in-market” consumers for products or services among its base, the rights holder can then use Nielsen Fan Insights data to build a compelling case for why they are an effective marketing vehicle for the brand.

According to recent data from the platform, the total fan population for the six newly added southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) amounts to nearly 210 million consumers. This massive addressable market represents significant opportunities for sponsors and brands to reach target audiences. Drilling into the data reveals these insights:

• Football is the most popular sport in Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam and second most popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.

• Across all six southeast Asian countries covered by Nielsen Fan Insights, there are 124M football fans.

• FIFA World Cup is the most popular sporting event across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

• The Asian Games rank in the top five in fan interest among events tracked in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.

• English Premier League ranks number two in Singapore and Vietnam, three in Malaysia and four in Thailand in terms of most popular league.

• Basketball reigns supreme as the most popular sport in the Philippines and the NBA is the league generating the highest fan interest there.

• The Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Lakers, Chicago Bulls, Miami Heat and Cleveland Cavaliers are the five most popular NBA teams in the Philippines.

• Badminton is the most popular sport in Indonesia and Malaysia and second most popular in Singapore.

The Nielsen Fan Insights platform is made possible by the unique combination of Nielsen’s media measurement and sports industry media valuation and analysis capabilities. Through Nielsen Fan Insights, users can understand what fans are actually buying, watching and listening to across media sources and assess the effectiveness of sponsorship and fan engagement activities.