Nielsen Sports South Africa has announced the launch of the global Nielsen Fan Insights platform, which it believes will provide its customers with the most comprehensive fan data on the planet.

Nielsen Fan Insights (NFI) is a digital dashboard that leverages Nielsen’s market research offering by providing an indepth view of sports and lifestyle fans’ interests, media behaviour, attitude to brands, product purchasing and service usage levels. This product currently serves over 20 key global sports and entertainment markets, including South Africa, China, Japan, South Korea, India, a number of European and South-East Asian markets, and the United States.

Significantly, the launch of NFI sees Nielsen Sports SA conducting research in 14 key African markets, with the majority of them previously under-researched. The research in South Africa and Nigeria is already complete and will be followed by forays this year into Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda, and Zambia.

“Africa is an under-researched market, and whilst we all claim to know the potential of the continent, there is very little real data to access, in terms of sport and lifestyle interest and opportunity potential,” says Jean Willers, Managing Director of Nielsen Sports South Africa. “Nielsen Sports will do the heavy lifting of conducting extensive market research from which customers will be able to gain unique insight, using the NFI platform, into sport and entertainment consumers in these particular African countries, which previously brands and organisations – globally – didn’t have access to.”

Nielsen Fan Insights covers a cross-section of demographics, sport, lifestlye and other interests, media and digital platform consumption and usage, plus awareness and interest in a wide range of events and teams.

“Customers will be able to strategically identify and assess partnership opportunities based on the tracking of brand metrics directly tied to fan segments, including brand familiarity, recommendation and willingness to purchase,” adds Willers. “An added attraction for brands will be the fact that they will be able to build a sales story for a specific brand and demonstrate the value being delivered for current partnerships.”

Additional NFI features include:

Advanced Filter Options

• select from a variety of properties, set filters to drill down, benchmark against other properties and markets

Fan Interests & Media Behaviour

• identify popular genres, the ranking of sports and teams, consumption behaviour of fans during sports viewing

Trend Data

• biannual data collection: covering interest, awareness, engagement, social media, media, product consumption, and service usage trends

Brand Industry Insights

• understand types of products and services your fan base is most connected to

Custom Analysis

• crosstab functionality with flexibility to build your own tables across markets and data sets

Nielsen Fan Insights will be attractive to rights-holders, broadcasters and brands – particularly those with a pan-African interest – as it offers its users the opportunity to gain a deep understanding of fan bases across sports, lifestyle interests, leagues, events and teams from a single, comprehensive dashboard.

For example, banks such as Standard Bank, which has already signed up, telecommuncations operators, oil and gas companies, continental sports bodies such as the Confederation of African Football, rights-holders and broadcasters with a pan-African reach.

“This market research will be unique for how robust it will be, with questionnaires tailor-made for each country, and here we will be working with credible third-party suppliers to ensure the sample is substantial and the data comprehensive, reflecting a true representation of the market in question,” says Willers. “Essentially, the idea behind this market research is for us to say to you, ‘in Uganda we now know exactly how popular badminton is and it’s specific market segment’, for example.”

Nielsen Sports is also able to tailor-make NFI to a particular customer, who might only have an interest in one sport or one particular country, whilst there is also the option of gaining access to the full dashboard, covering all sports, lifestyles and countries in question.

In this way, Nielsen Fan Insights is a unique global platform that provides its users with access to sports fan insights on one dashboard for multiple countries.