Like much of the TV ecosystem, sports content and viewing has become splintered across distribution modes and platforms and services. But with live sports still attracting big audiences and fandom and therefore ad budgets, measurement vendor VideoAmp sees opportunity and has brought on new talent to head up sports strategy as it seeks to expand relationships, including with leagues, and deliver on more precise measurement needs.
Dan Donnelly, a seasoned 20-year industry veteran with former senior roles at Fox Sports and Publicis Media was hired in January as Head of Sports Strategy at VideoAmp, a newly created role at the company. Reporting to Bryan Goski, EVP of Revenue at VideoAmp, Donnelly is tasked with addressing the need for accurate cross-platform measurement in the fragmented sports media landscape. His priorities include expanding and deepening customer relationships - where VideoAmp already counts Netflix Raw/WWE and CBS Sports as partners - and accelerating technological product capabilities focused on big-data-based precision in sports advertising.
StreamTV Insider sat down virtually to chat with Donnelly and Goski about the new role, opportunity and nuances of live sports measurement, and competition in the space.
Sports measurement ‘acute focus’ amid rising demand
In deciding to bring Donnelly on to head up sports strategy, VideoAmp sees opportunity to more squarely focus efforts and resources so it can tap into rising demands of the TV and advertising ecosystem for accurate content and ads measurement in the lucrative live sports space.
While the company already started to put emphasis on live sports in the back half of 2024, “sports is a very acute focus of VideoAmp as we have moved into 2025,” Goski told StreamTV Insider. That’s because the vendor believes for the future of live TV, including streaming and cross-platform, “sports is going to play such an integral part in that narrative among all of our partners.”
VideoAmp recently signed a long-term deal with Paramount, for example, which has a partnership with the NFL.
“We have to make sure, on behalf of our partners, that we’re measuring not only the content but the ads within those games to the highest quality necessary,” Goski said. And he expects the live sports genre “will drive not only a lot of ad dollars, but also a lot of content dollars, in terms of the measurement industry” in 2025 and beyond.
According to VideoAmp, nearly half of all media revenue is generated from live sports, where there’s also a strong connection between sports and out-of-home viewing.
And programmers and streamers are investing in live sports. A February Ampere Analysis report projects that this year streaming services collectively will account for 20% or $12.5 billion of the total $64 billion in global sports rights spending expected for 2025. While sports streamer DAZN will retain the top position, it’s followed by Amazon as the second largest sports streaming spender (increasing its share of the streaming spend pie from 18% to 23% including from an NBA rights deal for Prime Video that starts this season, as well as rights for NFL Thursday Night Football and UEFA Champions League). Thanks to its NFL Sunday Ticket Package YouTube TV is the third biggest sports streaming spender, per Ampere, with SVOD giant Netflix moving into the fourth spot this year due to deals for NFL Christmas Day games and a $500 million per year WWE deal that starts in 2025. Other programmers are also doling out for major sports, where the NBA’s reported $76 billion 11-year rights deals also includes NBCUniversal and its Peacock streaming service and Disney’s ABC and ESPN.
As streamers pony up for sports rights the hopes of attracting and retaining viewers and ad dollars, marketers too want to capitalize on the engagement of sports fans while also ensuring that their investments are working – something that’s more of a challenge in the fragmented ecosystem.
We’ll get into some of the nuances of live sports measurement in a minute, but Donnelly told StreamTV Insider that the biggest thing that separates sports from other types of content these days versus the past “is the stakes are so high” in terms of cost of entry for brands and advertisers.
“The cost of entry into most sports properties, whether it’s a major tentpole event or just an everyday regular season telecast of something, it really is starting to impact people’s budgets in a way that has never looked at the percent of the overall spend being so high before,” he said, adding that it’s not just beer or car brands, but “every brand” investing large shares of ad spend in sports because they feel it will drive the business as fans tend to have strong emotional connections to sports, teams or players.
Bringing relationships, expertise
Sports bring together a variety of stakeholders, including the platforms and services that deliver them, the brands and agencies investing media dollars against live sports, and the teams and leagues themselves that want to expand reach and deepen fan engagement.
Donnelly is a key hire in that regard, bringing experience from his time at Fox Sports, where he served as SVP of Ad Sales Strategy, overseeing strategic efforts influencing multi-billion dollars in ad revenue. VideoAmp also benefits from his experience on the other side of the coin with prior leadership roles on the media agency side, including at Publicis’ U.S. Sports and Entertainment division. Among earlier accomplishments, Donnelly has been involved in successfully negotiating high-profile media partnerships with major sports leagues, such as securing multi-year TV deals for Anheuser-Busch across the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS and others.
“Dan comes with 20-plus years of experience working directly with leagues, working directly with agencies. He knows the ins and outs of that business so acutely,” said Goski as to why Donnelly is the right fit. “And for something that’s such a high priority for us, we wanted to hire someone who is not only well connected and knows folks in the industry but knows the verticals like the back of his hand and can really bring value, not only to VideoAmp but more importantly to VideoAmp clients at the end of the day.”
Donnelly is poised to serve as the nexus, working directly with leagues like NFL, NBA, and others, networks like ESPN, Paramount and Fox, as well as agencies like Optimum Sports. The company has also formed a task force, dubbed VA Sports, within VideoAmp to drive the initiative.
The new sports strategy lead emphasized VideoAmp’s tech-forward approach as a differentiator. It's where Donnelly sees a need and ability to not only measure with accuracy, but do so in a way that’s easier for various stakeholders to understand and digest so that data and information is actionable.
Some of what Donnelly said he's excited for and focused on in the new role ultimately comes down to helping clients answer the question – is it working?
Is my investment actually working for me? Is the client getting all the impressions it should be and getting the impact, is it measuring outcomes like conversions? These are some of the questions he aims to ensure are answered for VideoAmp clients.
“It’s not just about a media KPI, it’s also about a business KPI and a brand KPI. Am I selling more product? Am I driving that purchase intent?” he said. “All of those things are really meaningful and what I’m excited to be doing here at VideoAmp. Yeah I’m focused on sports but at the end of the day, it’s that connection we have as a company to focus on everything, and sports is a major part of it.”
Nuances of live sports measurement – measuring ‘whistle-to-whistle’
As for measurement, there are some nuances to sports that make the genre unique from some other forms of content, including the live and appointment TV nature but with specific schedules that can vary by game.
Goski pointed to the need for very specific schedule information so you can, as he described, “measure whistle to whistle.” That generally refers to the need to adapt to and measure real-time changes. For example, if a game is scheduled to start at 3 pm and end at 6 pm but doesn’t actually end until 6:20 pm, the vendor needs to ensure it has the right schedule information to measure that extra 20 minutes, “which influences measurement of both ads and content.”
That type of measurement is need both for leagues directly, as well as partners on the network and streaming side.
Donnelly also cited sports' strong connection to out-of-home viewing - as it's one category in particular that lends itself to OOH viewing, with people often gathering communally at places like bars and restaurants – and the tendency for second-screen interactions simultaneously.
VideoAmp already touts a big data-driven OOH product, an element that Goski called out as “part of what’s been really enticing” for sports leagues.
“That out-of-home viewership is really important to all the leagues that we speak to,” he noted.
The vendor’s big data approach to OOH utilizes data automatically collected from TV set-top boxes and ACR-enabled smart TVs across the U.S. at bars and restaurants, which collect the information and VideoAmp leverages as partners.
“We can bring that data in to the scale of like hundreds of thousands of bars and restaurants, and then cross reference that with other data sets that we have in-house to be able to precisely tell whether someone is in a particular bar or restaurant watching a game at that particular time,” Goski explained, rather than being reliant on a subset or smaller panel input.
It’s not the only big data measurement provider in the space, where long-time measurement incumbent and ratings giant Nielsen itself last month secured Media Rating Council accreditation for its Big Data + Panel product, on the heels of a first-party live streaming data greenlight from the industry body. The news followed a bit of rocky time for Nielsen including a temporary suspension (and subsequent reinstation last year) of MRC accreditation for traditional panel-based national TV ratings due to undercounting viewership. Also making headlines in recent weeks is Nielsen’s new multi-year measurement pact with Paramount Global.
Nielsen MRC accreditation helps validate big data approach
Despite recent traction for Nielsen, Goski insisted this is actually beneficial to VideoAmp – which while a relative newcomer in measurement, has been at the big data game from the get-go.
According to Goski, news like Nielsen’s MRC accreditation is great, as in a way, it further validates big data methods over panel-only measurement, “because we’ve all now come to a big data approach.”
“What we say to them is, welcome to the party. We’ve been at big data for four years, five years, they’ve just arrived,” Goski said regarding Nielsen.
As for the Paramount-Nielsen deal, Goski isn’t privy to any information but in general believes it represents what VideoAmp anticipated, in terms of innovation and price correction in the market.
Other big data measurement providers are also in the mix serving as measurement partners to ecosystem, such as iSpot and Comscore.
VideoAmp, iSpot and Comscore all have U.S. Joint Industry Committee certification for use as national cross-platform currency for transacting TV ad buying and selling commitments (note, while certainly related, currency and measurement are two distinct things), an industry effort that Nielsen isn’t participating in. VideoAmp big data measurement products haven’t yet been accredited by the MRC, in what’s typically understood to be a lengthy and not inexpensive process.
And VideoAmp hasn’t been without its own struggles, including the need to slash 20% of its workforce early last year, coinciding with the exit of long-time CEO Ross McCray. Since then, the vendor has touted traction, including disclosing nearly $3 billion in media dollars guaranteed on its U.S.-JIC-certified currency as of the end of 2024.
Targeting sports league partners
Going forward, sports represent a growth opportunity for the measurement provider, including the potential to bring on leagues and teams – some of which are launching their own DTC sports streaming app offerings – as clients, where Donnelly affirmed much of his focus will be on the league side.
That doesn’t mean media owners, TV networks, streamers, agencies and brands themselves aren’t a priority, but Donnelly noted that the VideoAmp team already has those relationships across the board, whereas it hasn’t necessarily delved deeper into the league side of the equation.
He was keen to remind that even though leagues are selling intellectual property rights “those leagues are all big media platforms as well” be it TV networks they own and run, O&O digital platforms, as well as driving big media outlets via major amounts of social content related to sports.
In that regard, helping sports leagues and their partners, including official marketing partners or those buying media, to measure and understand the cross-platform impact “and make sure that we’re proving that things are working is another priority” in the new role, Donnelly said.
It also goes back to what VideoAmp views as historically inadequate panel-based measurement, where it believes the big data approach brings improved accuracy to content viewership and ads measurement data and can create value for the interconnected ecosystem of leagues, streaming platforms and networks – which in turn ideally creates revenue opportunity for the vendor itself.
“[What] we're trying to do is shore up that viewership to actually give them the value that they deserve based on who actually watched the events that they're bringing to market that cost them an extraordinary amount of money to bring to market,” Goski said. “So we want to make sure they get every dollar of value from that.”
Another aim with sports as more of a strategic focus is getting industry stakeholders more comfortable with tools and solutions that are different from the status quo, including through education. Based on his experience at Publicis and Fox Sports, Donnelly noted that sticking with the way things were done in the past can sometimes be the defacto operating mode, even if innovation is needed and the end result may be simpler.
“It's having those conversations with folks to get them to feel comfortable in what is uncomfortable,” Donnelly said of his new position at VideoAmp.
Again, here, he too contends movement by Nielsen in the space is further validation of what VideoAmp’s been doing in the big data measurement space and is helping push the broader industry forward.
“It’s pushed us to innovate, also much faster,” Goski added, regarding Nielsen’s big data accreditation, reiterating the view that it’s good news. “Competition is great for the market. We’re thankful for it.”
As for products, the execs didn’t provide any specific details around roadmap or plans related to sports, but Goski acknowledged there is cross-over with existing capabilities important for other types of live event content. In that sense, there are some ways it can reuse and enhance current measurement tools, with the opportunity to build upon products it already has in market and then fine-tune them for the sports-specific clients.
And while media measurement is and continues to be a complex and fragmented space, one bright spot about sports is that there’s always the next event. It’s part of why Donnelly and VideoAmp see necessity and opportunity in the ability to operationalize and aggregate big data measurement into dashboards and insights that are easy to understand and use.
“That’s what makes [measurement] so important for sports, because of the fact that it really just never stops…which can be daunting to some, but it’s exciting to me,” Donnelly said.