Indiantelevision.com Team

(Updated at 15 April 2009 11:30 pm)
(15 April 2009 5:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Tam Media Research has launched Tam Sports, an integrated data and insights service on sports, to provide sponsorship, advertising, brand placements and public relations (PR) data to advertisers, broadcasters and sports associations.

Apart from cricket, Tam Sports' data and insights will also cover domestic and international sporting properties like football, Hockey, F1, Rugby, Basketball, Boxing, Wrestling along with special events such as Commonwealth Games and Olympics.

Says Tam Media Research CEO LV Krishnan, "Starting now, sports sponsorship in India will see a new high. With unique definitions of what return on investments (RoI) from sporting events can be, each of the advertisers, the telecasting TV channels and the concerned sports associations will have one neutral, integrated data and insights hub that can act as a torch light for every sponsorship/marketing investment decision."

Tam Sports team will start establishing lines of communications with various types of advertisers, TV broadcasters and sports associations during the course of 2009.

To begin with, Tam Sports will showcase four special sports services namely:

Serve - The service will be undertaken for the TV broadcaster and will focus on analyzing and understanding the TV audience's absorption of different sporting property.

Bulls Eye - The service is aimed for the advertisers to help them judge their brand's fit with a sporting property and its performance.

Goal - This service is primarily aimed towards sports associations where they can understand the nuances of TV viewing of a particular type of sport. They can also find ways to market their sports to prospective sponsors.

Third Umpire - This is a special service that will monitor any copyright violation done by any television channel.

"Services like Serve, Bulls Eye, Goal and Third Umpire are some of the many specialized services. Many more will follow after understanding unique requirements of individual organizations involved with sports and televised sports properties," says Tam Media Research senior VP Pradeep Hejmadi, who will be supervising the day-to-day operations of Tam Sports.

Sports content goes up

Sports programming has increased from 65,179 hours in 2007 to 71,350 hours in 2008. And in the first quarter of 2009, there are already 17000 hours of sports content.

The rise in the programming has also pushed up the ad inventories of sports channels. The trend shows that 3,917 hours of ad inventory was consumed in 2008, up from 3,484 hours in 2007 and 2,637 hours in 2006.

For the first quarter of 2009, Tam data shows that sports channels enjoyed 788 hours of ad inventory.

Meanwhile, the brands investing in sports are also on a rise. Year 2008 saw 12,441 brands endorsing various sports genres, rising from 10,948 in 2007 and 9,347 in 2006.

The findings show that though cricket is the main attraction for brand association, various other sports are also becoming market savvy. These include soccer, car/bike racing, golf and tennis.

While 3598 brands associated with cricket in 2008, soccer attracted 1,462 brands and car/bike racing 1,255 brands. Golf had the support of 672 brands while 424 brands took to tennis.