Sponsorship Effectiveness Index Products

One of the earliest forms of marketing communication is True Sponsorship. NCM defines True Sponsorship as "a sponsoring company or organization that brings entertainment or information content as a gift to an audience." This form was popular and effective with advertisers at the dawn of television and earlier in radio. Today it has largely been replaced by "hard-sell advertising." Yet Veronis & Suhler projects that over the next five years sponsorship (already a multibillion dollar category) will be the fastest growing of all media forms except for the Internet. Sponsorship is likely to be the surviving form in the long-term future as new technologies gradually allow more and more commercials to be "zapped." NCM responded to interested industry parties by developing the first research method aimed at quantifying the business building effects of sponsorship – the Sponsorship Effectiveness Index. Sponsorship Effectiveness Index (SEI) is a system for measuring the effect of an advertiser's sponsorship of an Internet site. When SEI software has been installed at a web site, a sample of visitors to the site are divided into test and control groups. These visitors are then automatically queried to discover the differences between them related to their exposure to the sponsor's ads. That is the method used by SEI today on the Internet, and the method is being extended to respond to advertiser requests that event and other media sponsorships also be measured on a comparable basis by the SEI system.

The SEI was developed by NCM at the request of Andrew Susman, Chairman of the Sponsorship Committee of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and CEO of Studio One Networks (SON). SON provided a grant for the creation of the SEI software which is the property of SON, and the SEI is operated by NCM under contract to SON. Click here for a report on the results of SEI in studies for about a dozen major advertisers.