Everyone can tell you who watched. ABX tells you what your creative did — to Reputation, Action, and Purchase Intent. The single-score way to know whether your sports advertising is building your brand or just borrowing the moment, before you commit the media and after it airs.

The Opportunity

Sports Is the Premium Context — But Only When Done Right

Roughly 40% of national U.S. TV advertising is now tied to sports, and streaming has made live sports the most contested ad real estate in media. Sponsorships and major-event placements are among the most visible, highest-stakes investments a brand makes — yet creative performance is usually assumed, not measured, until the campaign is already live and the money is already spent.

That gap is expensive. Creative drives roughly 65% of advertising effectiveness — far more than most analytics models credit — and in a sports event, where emotion and fandom raise both the ceiling and the risk, that 65% is where campaigns are won or lost.

What to Do

Premium Events Can’t Save Ineffective Creative

Super Bowl ads have scored below the same brand’s prior-12-month average for 13 straight years — advertisers chase spectacle instead of telling their own brand story, and a multimillion-dollar placement is wasted. Testing sports creative before you sponsor or buy lets brands see how it resonates with sports fans and high-value sub-segments, identify which messages and narratives drive Reputation and action, reduce risk in high-profile environments, and optimize while there’s still time.

What the Index Reveals

Sports Fans Respond. Women’s-Sports Fans Respond Most.

Across all major sports events analyzed to date, sports fans consistently rate advertising higher on the KPIs that count — Reputation, Any Action, and Purchase Intent. One segment over-indexes on all three, repeatedly:

Women’s-sports fans also rate advertising higher on GEM® (gender representation) and Cultural Representation, and including female characters in sports creative drives gains in Reputation and GEM®. This is not women’s sports versus men’s sports: the Index evaluates all sports advertising on one objective scale, so decisions are guided by data, not assumptions.

What You Need

A Single Score for the True Impact of Sports Advertising

The ABX Sports Impact Index™ is a proprietary, single-score solution built on one of the world’s largest syndicated databases of in-market advertising — 500,000+ ads, where 100 equals the category norm. It isolates how sports passion translates into measurable creative effectiveness across every major media channel, using the same proven methodology ABX applies globally. It was officially unveiled at the 2025 ANA Masters of Marketing Conference.

Every analysis reports the six KPIs decision-makers need for success:

How ABX Is Different

Most Tools Measure the Moment. ABX Measures the Creative.

The field is crowded — attention vendors, outcomes platforms, and the research giants are all bolting AI speed onto sponsorship and engagement data. Almost all of it answers a different question: how many were exposed, how long they looked, or what search lift followed — and most of it only arrives after the ad has run. ABX is the only solution that scores the creative against a unified, cross-media benchmark of 500,000+ ads, and the only one that does it before the buy, when you can still change the outcome.

Featured Analyses

Real Events. Real Results. One Methodology.

Ongoing, real-world analyses applying the same standardized ABX methodology. Advertiser brands are anonymized; the events and what worked are not.

Additional sports, leagues, and championship analyses are added as the Index expands.

Why ABX

25+ Years. Every Medium. One Benchmark.

• Only ABX delivers the creative insights — unique, actionable guidance on improving creative for sports audiences, not just a count of who was exposed.
• Only ABX has the metric that makes it possible — a single, proven score that turns sports passion into measurable creative effectiveness, before and after the buy.
• Only ABX has the benchmarks to prove it — 500,000+ in-market ads showing what actually works against the category norm.
• Consultants to the giants — Kantar, GfK, Ipsos, and Nielsen turned to our founders for guidance.
• The broadest channel coverage in the industry — not just TV and digital, but radio, podcasts, OOH, in-store, cinema, FSI, magazines, product integration, and more, all on one comparable scale.
• Trusted research partner to the ANA, RAB, OAAA, the Insights Association, and ESOMAR.