Leveraging Video Recognition to Measure Sponsorship Exposure

On January 1, 2018, NBC televised the 10th NHL Winter Classic — an outdoor professional hockey game played each year on New Year’s Day. This year’s Classic was hosted at Citi Field — home of MLB’s New York Mets — and featured the New York Rangers vs. Buffalo Sabres.

This event has become the NHL’s biggest regular season stage and has historically attracted millions of viewers; and as a result, has also attracted several big name sponsors.

The Rangers won this year’s game in thrilling overtime fashion, but which sponsor took home the most on-screen exposure during NBC’s broadcast?

Using advanced video recognition technology from Netra, we analyzed video footage of the event and detected brand logos as they appeared on the screen. In addition to simple detection, we used this technology to also measure time on screen, position on screen, logo clarity, and size on screen. Below are a few interesting findings from our analysis.

Note: we only analyzed the overtime period.

Time on Screen

If you include digital logos shown on the screen, NBC (obviously) was the logo with the most screen time followed by Volkswagen, the sponsor of the scoreboard in the top-left corner of the screen.

Rounding out the top 5 were Adidas (1 asset along the boards, w/ 3 Adidas logos), Bridgestone (4 unique assets along the boards), and Geico (2 unique assets along boards). All of these sponsors had multiple unique assets and is a reason why their brand showed up most frequently overall, as they had exposure at different camera angles and areas of the ice rink.

But if you look at the time on screen per asset, Citi and Dunkin’ Donuts jump to the top for in-stadium sponsors due to their strategic positions along the boards, where the camera focuses the most during NHL games. This was also the end of the rink where the Rangers scored the game-winning goal (replays!).

Size on Screen (“Prominence”)

Prominence is calculated as a function of position on screen and size of logo on screen.

When you’re measuring sponsorship exposure, it’s important to also take into consideration the size and position of the logo on the screen; Netra uses these variables to calculate a brand’s “prominence” score.

Coors scored the highest average prominence score out of all the sponsors. Even though it was only visible for ~1% of the footage, it was shown prominently when on the screen. Looking into the data, this seems to be because Coors placed a logo within the Buffalo Sabres’ penalty box that got good exposure when a Sabres’ forward committed a penalty and was sent to the box:

Coming in second place for prominence was Nikon, who interestingly enough did not have any logos on the rink itself. Instead they’re a prominent sponsor on the outfield scoreboard at Citi field, and reaped the benefits when NBC shifted to ice-level camera angles:

Here’s the rest of the top 5 in terms of prominence:

Overall Loser

With one of the lowest brand logo clarity scores, Honda was one of the biggest losers in terms of in-stadium sponsorship exposre. They had an asset behind the net that was often obstructed by the rink’s glass and stanchions, and an in-­ice asset at center ice that was very hard to see and also often obstructed from view:

Overall Winner

You could argue that it should be Nikon since they got so much exposure from their existing asset on the Citi Field scoreboard. But to be fair, the winner is clearly Bridgestone. They score very high in terms of time on screen and size of occurrence on screen. And it’s not called the Bridgestone Winter Classic for nothing.

Other winners are Citi and Dunkin’ Donuts who had fewer assets than Bridgestone yet still managed to get very long on-screen exposure times and solid logo prominence scores.

Closing Thoughts

Measuring sponsorship ROI is a tricky challenge, and calculating time and size of logo on screen is just one piece of the puzzle. We hope we’ve shown you the power of video recognition in automating part of this analysis and also providing some interesting insight around which asset positions within a game get the most exposure (e.g. corners of a hockey rink) or don’t (e.g. directly behind the net). And if you’re interested in sponsoring a team that gets a lot of penalties, perhaps the glass of the penalty box could be a valuable spot to place your logo!

Below is a summary of the full analysis. Please contact us at info@netra.io if you’d like to learn more!

Notes on the analysis

This analysis was conducted only on footage of the overtime period, but can be easily done on any length of video, for any sport and even for branded integrations. Netra automates this analysis using video recognition technology built on proprietary artificial intelligence, and can analyze hours of footage in a fraction of the time. NOTE: Some logos in this analysis were not detected (e.g. Pep Boys, Ticketmaster) as Netra’s system is not yet trained on these specific logos.