NFL Audience Data and Insights

Bud Light vs. Miller Lite vs. Coors Light compete in #BeerBowl 2019

by StatSocial | Jan 28, 2019

The conference championships have now been decided. Super Bowl LIII will feature postseason perennials, the New England Patriots facing off against the Los Angeles Rams. In celebration of Super Sunday 2019, we march on with our series of entries applying the powerful social media audience analysis of the StatSocial tool to the fan bases of every NFL team. We’re giving all sorts of once overs, from a vast many different angles.

We’ve looked at which teams have the friendliest fans, revealed how each team’s fans lean politically, and even looked at which team’s fans most dig Walt Disney World.

This time out we’re plunging into a topic near and dear to the hearts of many a football fan. Brews. Preferably cold. Some, however, like to consider their waistlines. The metabolism does change as we get older, and the term “beer belly” wasn’t yanked out of thin air.

For many decades now, beer manufacturers have addressed this issue head on, offering “light” versions of their celebrated brands. Not showing favoritism here with this quote, but as Miller’s extremely memorable ad campaign put it, these lower calorie alternatives would provide you — the thirsty consumer — “Everything you’ve always wanted in a beer. And less.”

Many a can of each of the brands featured here have been popped open in front of millions of TVs throughout America, each and every Sunday, during each and every autumn.

We’ve analyzed hundreds of thousands of the fans of every NFL squad who also identify as fans of Bud Light, Coors Light, and/or Miller Lite. The chart below reflects what proportion of each team’s light beer drinkers prefer which brand.

Coors Light, while a very popular brand, is in an inarguable third place here. The brand had once been the NFL’s official beer sponsor.

The first successful American light beer brand, Miller Lite, is somewhat confidently the king of this mountain. The star-studded, “tastes great, less filling” ad campaign, which has found its memorable slogan repurposed for a truckload of memes in recent years, has forever wedged itself in the minds of millions of light beer drinkers and football fans.

Without getting into all the ins and outs of mergers and divestment of brands, the conglomerate known as MillerCoors manufactures — as their name suggests — both Coors Light and Miller Lite. So really, it’s all a win for them.

Fans of the Patriots show a preference for Bud Light above the alternatives. The Pats’ Super Bowl opposition, the Rams, find themselves admired by fans who also prefer Budweiser’s lighter kid brother brand.

This “kid brother” brand, of course, has for the past few years been — and will be for many years to come — the NFL’s official beer sponsor.

Bud Light revealed itself to be no mere contender or pretender during 1991’s Bud Bowl III. Much as the Joe Namath led New York Jets had legitimized the AFL (later the AFC) with their upset victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, the King of Beers’ princely sibling managed a historic victory (which you can see by clicking here). From that point forward Bud Light was taken quite seriously by fans of stop-motion animated, beer-oriented football games everywhere.

Devotees of the Denver Broncos, while made up of a larger proportion of Bud Light drinkers, find the most profound percentage of their fans consumers of Coors Light. Coors being a proud Colorado company, this ultimately makes sense.

Green Bay, Wisconsin may be a two hour drive from Milwaukee, but the Packers are without question Milwaukee’s team. Automobile manufacturing. may have put Detroit on the map, and there’s little doubt that the Packers made Green Bay famous, but what made Milwaukee famous is beer.

This is simply to say that the overwhelming preference for Miller Lite evident among the Packers’ fans could be construed as high praise indeed.

L-R: Michigan State and Baltimore Colts defensive end, the late Bubba Smith, and Hall of Fame linebacker, Dick Butkus, of the Chicago Bears, in a Miller Lite commercial from 1979.

Bookmark This Page,

We’ll be visiting numerous subjects of this general nature — all highlighting the rich and varied affinities of each NFL team’s fans — in the days running up to Super Bowl LIII.

And check out the written matter in the footer, and reach out to us if you have any questions or would like to see much, much more.

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You can snoop around the greater StatSocial Insights blog by clicking here.

To learn more or request a demo, click here.

(BIG DATA) The NFL’s Millennial Fan Base

by StatSocial | Jan 24, 2019

The Redskins have the league’s oldest fan base, the Steelers the youngest.

Super Bowl LIII — featuring as it will a contest between New England’s Patriots and Los Angeles’ Rams — is right around the corner. As we’ve been doing, we are continuing to employ the StatSocial audience analysis tool to learn about many different aspects of all of the NFL team’s fans.

These mini-studies (viewable in full at our StatSocial blog here) each give a mere hint as to the diverse and essential insights this powerful analytics engine will generate regarding any audience about which you need to learn.

That Most Coveted of Audience Segments

The now fully grown generation — the fabled Millennials — those hovering around their early-20s to the their late-30s, whose cultural influence is no doubt profound, are our focus here. Simply, StatSocial has looked at hundreds of thousands of the fans of each NFL team, determining the varying percentages of every audience whose birth dates fall within the 1981 to 1996 date range; the years defined by The Pew Research Center as those during which Millennials emerged in their nascent forms.

The City of Bridges is the City of the Future

Jets great Broadway Joe Namath and Giants great Phil Simms

The Cowboys and Steelers Have the NFL’s Most Emotional fans. Where does your team rank?

by StatSocial | Jan 22, 2019

Football fever is ramping up as the teams going to Super Bowl LIII have now been determined.

Throughout the (post-) season, we’ve been diving into the various affinities, allegiances, habits, hobbies, beliefs, personalities, and demographics found among the individuals making up each NFL team’s fan base.

If You’re New Here

If you’ve already checked out our entry on the NFL’s friendliest fans, this next part may be redundant for you (but welcome back!).

If you’re wondering HOW we can measure an audience’s personality traits, such as friendliness or emotionality, allow us to explain.

Thanks to StatSocial’s partnership with IBM Watson™ and the integration of their Personality Insights™ service into our reporting, we can not only break down an audience by affinities and demographics, but also by personality traits. How does Watson do that, you ask?

IBM Watson Personality Insights™ allows StatSocial to understand the personality types, traits, intrinsic needs, and values of individuals based on the way people write — i.e. the different types of language people choose to express themselves. Analyzing the language used — and a number of other factors including frequency of communication, interaction with others, etc. (you can read much more at the IBM blog entry here) — IBM Watson can score personality traits across a number of interesting dimensions.

StatSocial applies this insight to all of our analyses.

Whatever team you are rooting for, you’d probably like to get to the topic at hand. Here you go.

“It’s just emotion that’s taken me over”

While a presumption of impartiality should be made when reading the insights shared in every entry of the StatSocial blog — “statistics” basically being right there in our name, and all — you should especially infer no reporting of virtue and/or faults here.

Emotions are complicated things, but they’re not inherently bad. Didn’t you see Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’?

The team whose fans we found to be the friendliest in the NFL are also the most emotional. Even feelings are big in Texas, it seems.

The once heated rivalry between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cowboys is brought to mind by this list’s upper reaches. Three times the two NFL teams with the most emotional fans faced off in the Super Bowl, and only once did the Cowboys emerge victorious. So many feels.

The most emotional and least emotional fan bases showed up to home games this past season, with the teams on either end of the list having more or less sold out every game. Clearly, this is not a measure of dedication.

To further illustrate: Watch as our company’s CEO — a one time Maine native, and accordingly a Patriots fanatic — displays his dedication with only the coolest of heads.

(If you have “Do Not Track” enabled on your browser, you can see the below by clicking-through here.)

(Edited to Add, 2/4/2019: On the evening of February 1, 2019, Michael Hussey — StatSocial’s CEO — again attempted the above feat, and again emerged victorious. The difference? This year his gutsy bacchanal inspired his beloved Patriots to victory.)

A moving tribute, no doubt. The outcome of the game in question is of no consequence here, it’s the combination of dedication and stoicism to which we draw attention.

As of this writing, the Patriots emerged from Sunday’s AFC Championship Game victorious. While in the 48.9th percentile for emotionality (so, a bit below average), in the grand scheme of the 32 NFL fan bases, Pats fans are the 9th most emotional.

It remains to be known whether our CEO will be attempting his show of dedication once more, or if perhaps this year he has something else planned. Whatever the case may be, do not let his levelheaded demeanor deceive you. He cares to a degree that can not adequately be measured in Filet-O-Fish (Filet-o-Fishes?).

Bookmark This Page

We’ll be visiting numerous subjects of this general nature — all highlighting the rich and varied affinities of each NFL team’s fans — in the days running up to Super Bowl LIII.

And check out the written matter in the footer, and reach out to us if you have any questions or would like to see much, much more.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

You can snoop around the greater StatSocial Insights blog by clicking here.

To learn more or request a demo, click here.

Which NFL team’s fans will be “Going to Disney World”?

by StatSocial | Jan 17, 2019

Super Bowl LIII is right around the corner. Until that winter holiday arrives, our series of entries looking at the social media audiences of each NFL team will continue.

The StatSocial audience analysis tool provides extraordinarily detailed explorations of the affinities, hobbies, habits, demographics, and even personality types of every social media audience imaginable.

“I’m going to Disney World!”

On January, 26 1987, the Monday morning after the New York Giants’ first ever Super Bowl victory, the below commercial aired. Just like that, an ad campaign as legendary and enduring as any ever devised was launched.

(If you have “Do Not Track” enabled on your browser, you can see the below by clicking-through here.)

Michael Eisner, then Disney CEO, had come up with the idea only two days prior to the big game.

Super Bowl XXI found the Giants facing off against the Denver Broncos. Both team’s quarterbacks were contracted for the spot. To the victor went the slogan. Neither Phil Simms nor the Broncos’ John Elway could possibly have known that “I’m going to Disney World” (or, alternately, “Disneyland”) would immediately and for decades thereafter become synonymous with glory, achievement, and excellence.

A few years back, ‘Sports Illustrated’ ran a piece detailing the iconic campaign’s history, which you can check out here.

Diving into the statistics on every NFL team’s audience, we determined what proportion of each is made up of those demonstrably devoted to Orlando, Florida’s mammoth and breathtaking Walt Disney World.

As synonymous with American popular culture and industry as both Walt and the theme parks and resorts that bear his name are, convenience seems to be something of a factor here. The top three teams on the list share a Sunshine State home with Disney World.

While there’s a sharp proportional drop-off once the list hits the fourth place slot, things geographically shoot 1,200 miles north to the brisk climes of Buffalo, New York. Hey Omnicom OMD (Disney’s agency of record) — perhaps you should give the team at Pegula Sports and Entertainment a call.