Professional athletes dominate advertising space. It’s difficult to make it through a two-minute commercial break without seeing LeBron James sporting Beats or Peyton Manning singing about chicken parm. But how do companies know what athletes to sign to these advertising deals?
Founded in 2014, MVPIndex is a consulting firm designed to help make businesses make informed business decisions on who to hire as their spokesperson. Using a unique brand ambassador index, the online service gives businesses information on an athlete’s social media habits.
The index tracks a professional athlete’s postings on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube, then gives them a rating of 0-10 based on their profiles’ reach, engagement and conversation.
Reach can best be categorized as the number of followers a player has on any given platform. The more followers, the higher the reach score.
Engagement is the frequency that an athlete replies to messages sent to them and retweets (or the platform equivalent) messages they are tagged in.
Conversation is the rate at which an athlete is talked about on social media. Frequency is not the only influence on this score, but also what is being said on social media. For example, an athlete being arrested will negatively impact this score.
Athletes are also only compared against other athletes in their sport, so Bubba Watson would not go up against Russell Wilson.
MVPIndex tracks more than 25,000 professional athletes, more than 1,000 teams, and 41 professional sports leagues including the Summer and Winter Olympics. In an interview with SportTechie, Chief Marketing Organizer and co-founder Kyle Wilson referred to MVPIndex as, “the largest database of sports media content in the world.”
“We started as an agency to help businesses and athletes build their digital brands. We work as the in-between to help brands find their guys for their organizations.” Wilson said.
MVPIndex is also able to provide data for the effectiveness of multiple brand ambassadors. For example, Subway could use MVPIndex to determine how Robert Griffin III was doing compared to Justin Tuck or any other NFL athlete selling their sandwiches.
In terms of future endeavors, the firm is working on a keyword module where businesses can type in a keyword and pull up every tweet in their database with that phrase to see what athletes are tweeting it.
Also, they have a system called Serendipity in development that while using that same keyword allows companies to pull up the top brand ambassador in each sport as well as across all sports when it comes to that phrase.
“What’s great about Serendipity is that it all comes in instantaneously,” Wilson said. “In the old days, you would have to go in and manually check the whole database without that search function.”