Major League Baseball has just returned to action, and Katz Media is offering a peek at a case study from last season to demonstrate that radio ads deliver home runs for marketers. Katz partnered with a home-improvement retailer to use a season-long broadcast radio campaign whose aim was to increase brand engagement among homeowners in the Midwest. The post-season analysis shows those ads sent scores of baseball fans to the retailer’s website.
The ads for the unnamed store chain aired during baseball games on a Midwestern city’s radio flagship station as well as its radio affiliates across the region. Katz Analytics, powered by LeadsRx, provided campaign measurement to track radio’s impact on consumers’ online engagement. The scoreboard showed a win for radio.
By the end of the season, Katz says the radio campaign drove more than 17,000 web sessions to the home-improvement retailer’s website. That resulted in a 4.2% lift in web traffic attributed to radio. And Katz says all spots contributed to the lift, delivering an average of nine visits per radio spot that aired.
The campaign’s creative mix included 30-second brand spots. There were also contextual play-by-play spots that consisted of announcer-voiced 30-second ads, and MLB game feature spots. Each delivered unique results, according to the analysis.
Katz says the brand spots drove roughly 2,000 visits to the retailer’s website. But the more integrated spots did even better. The MLB feature spots — the five-second pre-game, in-game, and post-game features — drove over 8,000 website visits, and the announcer-voiced spots drove nearly 7,000 website visits. The analysis shows the two spot types that were more integrated into the play-by-play of the game proved to be the “heavy hitters,” according to Katz. It says those more contextual ads drove 89% of all radio-attributed web visits during the season.
“Major League Baseball game broadcasts on radio gave the home-improvement brand the unique opportunity to tap into a strong fandom and utilize beloved announcers to help break through and drive results,” Katz says in the case study. Just as important for broadcasters, Katz says the retailer continues to use radio play-by-play in its media mix today. But the rep firm says it is now more confident that radio “knocks it out of the park, delivering their target consumers and boosting online engagement with the brand.”
Katz in 2023 released the result of a survey of 800 baseball fans that found that three in four (76%) listen to MLB radio broadcasts of games at least once a week or more, and 72% of those listeners are engaged with the advertising on those games. Not only did three-fourths say they listen to MLB radio broadcasts weekly, but seven in ten MLB radio listeners (72%) notice the brands that advertise during games; two-thirds (66%) are more willing to use brands advertised during their favorite team’s games; and 69% have a better opinion of the sponsors of their favorite team’s play-by-play.
Comentários