Founded in July 2010, YouGov Sport — an integrated division of YouGov —  is a global sports, sponsorship and entertainment research company, and part of one of the world’s largest and most respected internet-based market research and data analytics firms. 

At YouGov Sport we work with many different companies to help them understand the value of their branding at particular sport events. So, our bread and butter really is about working with those companies to understand the potential in their advertising spending. 

When people think of YouGov, they tend to think very much about consumer feedback. Yes, we do use consumer opinion to understand the impact of branding. Our Sport Media department specialize mostly in understanding the number of people watching a particular sporting event, and how our customer’s branding and message is appearing on the screen  – as well as the effect it has on their brand exposure.

We use this information to place a value on the impact each time a brand appears during a sports event. From there, our clients are much better positioned to understand whether these branding opportunities are viable, or if their company’s advertising revenue or branding would be best placed in other areas, or across other sporting events.

Our customers are mainly rights holders, and also brands. Rights holders include companies like athletic leagues or championships. In terms of brands, we work with a range of companies. Two of the larger brands we service include a market leading auto e-commerce company and a large international airline, and they sponsor loads of different sporting events throughout the year. 

When it comes to our customers making deals, whether the rights holder working with a brand or vice versa, it’s really hard for them to know whether the deal they have in place is effective or not, and what the advertising value should truly be.

Therefore, our customers come to us and ask us to explore all elements of their branding campaigns. We will look at how many people are actually watching the sport event, we will consider how many times their brand is appearing on the screen, what it looks like, whether there are other brands present, how much noise is there on the screen when the brand appears, how much chatter is there around the event, is the brand presented throughout that, etc. 

By considering those variables, we are able to add tangible elements to the questions: What is the value of this branding strategy? It’s quite a difficult thing to come up with an answer for. 

A relevant example that I can share is around Wimbledon, the oldest tennis tournament in the world and one of the four major grand slam championship tennis tournaments.

We typically work with several different brands to let them know how their branding got on at that particular event. One brand in particular, said, “Look, we’ve got some branding at the back of the court – we are interested to know how effective that was.”

To perform our analysis, we look at all the footage, and we see how often that brand appears during the actual match play. Then we also consider the size of it, whether there are other brands present, etc. From there, using that data and combining it with the audiences of different broadcasters casting the game all across the world, we are able to come up with a strong value figure for the strategy itself.

The brand that we were working with at last year’s Wimbledon actually came to us and said: “Well, you’ve told us that our branding has plummeted year on year. Why is that?” 

So, what we did is we went back to the footage, had a look through and we found out that it was a ball boy that kept standing in the way of their branding. As a result of that, the next day of the competition, that brand was able to encourage the boy to move slightly out of the way.

There are a lot of competitors out there that do elements of what we do. But we cover the broadcast analysis, we cover the secondary media side of things and we do it incredibly quickly. On top of that, we have the option for the client to then explore what customers are actually thinking and perceiving about their brand from the consumer side or the survey side of the business.

The website of things is basically our bread and butter when it comes to secondary media. If you imagine that a sports event is not just shown on your TV, it’s broadcast all over the world. It might be through social media platforms, it might be through website articles, etc. 

We also include things like TV news into our analysis, which for us is web data that we can gather from news clips posted on the internet, and then break it down into frames of images. All the images that we gather come through web searches – using our image recognition system – which recognizes and looks for specific types of branding. 

Without the ability to collect public web data from the internet, we are unable to know when a brand was present across these mediums and also its reach. 

We have an incredible group of developers within our team, but the sheer speed at which we’ve grown as a business, the media analysis side of sports – and I guess, because we do offer this whole package – the emphasis really being put on secondary media these days. Therefore, we needed some support. 

Our developers are able to do some elements of public web data collection, but we needed advice, we needed help. And we needed to do it much, much quicker and with much, much higher volume. Hence, we came to Bright Data for support in that area. 

The account management side of things is really proactive. If we have a question, our account manager is very quick to respond. If there is any problem in the flow of data between Bright Data and our bespoke dashboard that we have, we know about that through alert systems. 

The problems arise mainly due to the social media platforms themselves changing their formats, but Bright Data is always on it straightaway. The fact that we can also login into Bright Data’s platforms and track the status of a particular data feed that we have, that makes a big difference.

There’s no way that we could keep growing at the speed in which we are without Bright Data’s support.

YouGov Sport成立于2010年7月，是YouGov 的一个综合部门。YouGov是一家全球体育、赞助和娱乐研究公司，也是世界上规模最大、最有声望的基于互联网的市场研究和数据分析公司之一。

在 YouGov Sport，我们与许多不同的公司合作，帮助他们了解其品牌在特定体育赛事中的价值。我们凭借与这些公司合作，帮助其了解广告支出潜力创收。

YouGov 以非常关注消费者的反馈著称。是的，我们确实利用消费者意见来了解品牌影响力。我们的体育媒体部门主要专注于观看特定体育赛事的人数，客户品牌和信息如何呈现在屏幕上，以及呈现方式对其品牌知名度的影响。

我们利用这些信息来评估品牌每次出现在体育赛事中的影响。我们的客户可以更好地了解这些品牌推广机会是否可行，又或是其他领域或体育赛事更适合该公司进行广告创收或品牌推广。

我们的客户主要是权利人，也包括品牌商。权利持有人包括体育联盟等公司或锦标赛。提到品牌，我们与多家公司都有合作；我们服务的两个较大品牌包括一家市场领航汽车电商公司和一家大型国际航空公司，它们全年会赞助大量不同的体育赛事。

当涉及到客户交易时，无论是权利人与品牌合作还是品牌通过权利人推广，双方都很难知道他们达成的交易是否有效，以及广告价值应该是多少。

因此，客户找到我们，要求我们探究他们品牌活动的所有元素。我们会了解有多少人在实际观看赛事，会考虑品牌在屏幕上出现了多少次，它的展现方式，是否有其他品牌在场，当品牌出现时屏幕上有多少噪音，活动现场有多少人在闲谈，品牌是否贯穿整个活动等信息。

通过考虑这些变量，我们能够丰富问题涉及的因素：这种品牌战略的价值是什么？找到问题答案是一件相当困难的事情。

我可以分享的一个温布尔登的例子，这是世界上最古老的网球锦标赛，也是四大满贯网球锦标赛之一。

我们通常与几个不同的品牌合作，让对方知道他们的品牌在特定活动中是如何进行推广的。其中有一个品牌，特别说到：“看，球场后面也能看到一些我们品牌的影子，我们很想知道这种推广方式效果如何。”

为了进行分析，我们查看了所有镜头，并确认该品牌在实际比赛中出现的频率。接着我们考虑了品牌的展现尺寸，现场是否有其他品牌等。分析这些方面，使用这些数据并将其与世界各地不同广播公司的观众数量相结合，我们能够得出战略本身强大的价值数字。

去年温布尔登与我们合作的品牌来找到我们说：“请你告诉我们，我们的品牌曝光度在逐年下降。这是为什么？”

回答这个问题，我们所做的就是仔细查看镜头，最终发现是一个球童所站的位置，遮挡了品牌。于是，在比赛的第二天，那个品牌告诉男孩移动位置，这样品牌广告就展露无遗了。

有很多竞争对手在做和我们一样的事情。但是我们涵盖了广播分析，涵盖了从属媒体，并且我们效率高，速度快。最重要的是，客户可以选择从消费者或企业调查角度品牌的实际影响。

在从属媒体层面，我们主要依靠网站生存。如果您想象一下体育赛事不仅在电视上播放，还会在网络上向全世界播放。它可能是通过社交媒体平台传播，也可能是通过网站文章等方式。

我们还将电视新闻等内容纳入我们的分析，因为对我们来说，这是我们从发布在互联网上的新闻片段中采集的网络数据，接着我们将其分解为图像帧。我们采集的所有图像都来自网络搜索，只需使用我们的图像识别系统，即可识别并寻找特定类型的品牌。

如果不能从互联网采集公开网络数据，我们就无法知道品牌何时在这些媒体平台出现及它的影响力。

我们的团队中有一群优秀的开发人员，但我们业务中发展最快的，是体育领域的媒体分析。我猜，可能因为我们提供的是一个系统服务，我们真正关注的是现在的丛属媒体。因此，我们需要一些支持。

我们的开发人员能够完成一些公开网络数据采集的工作，但我们需要专业的建议，需要帮助。并且我们非常需要提高效率，增大工作量。因此，我们找到亮数据获取支持。

亮数据的客户帐户管理服务非常优秀，任何问题，我们的客户经理都会很快回复。如果亮数据和我们定制仪表板之间的数据流存在任何问题，警报系统会立即通知。

使用过程中出现问题多来自社交媒体平台改变格式，但亮数据一直很稳定。事实上，我们还可以登录亮数据平台并跟踪我们拥有的特定数据源的状态，这会带来不小的提升。

没有亮数据的支持，我们不可能以现在的速度稳定增长。