At a time when predictive analytics are regularly employed to assess yield for ticket sales, and touted as the ultimate tool to assess player performance, a University of North Carolina professor spent more than eight years building a data set of sponsorships from around the world that he says can predict how long any particular deal is likely to last and the revenue potential of the deal.
With that much data as an anchor, Jonathan Jensen, an associate professor of sport administration at UNC, says he’s able to predict how long each sponsor will last, based on factors including fees; category dynamics; whether it’s a B2B or B2C play; economic factors, including GDP and CPI; location of the property and sponsor; whether the sponsorship is a hometown play; whether the sponsor is publicly traded; along with a variable for clutter within a specific category or property.