BLOG | by Bruce Cook

Six Nations Breakdown | Buzz is Back

Earlier this year, we described in our SportsIndex Buzz Report how the 2018 version of the Six Nations Championship had fallen into the shadow of the year’s many big events – competitions such as the Commonwealth Games, the FIFA World Cup and the Winter Olympics.

We predicted that the tournament would stage a comeback on its peak Buzz score in 2019. And when we took a look at the data this week, that’s exactly what it’s done – and some. An England win could potentially take that peak to even higher levels.

Guinness getting noticed

Guinness’s primary objective with its Six Nations title partnership would have been to shore up the excellent relationship the brand already enjoys with rugby fans (it is their number one beer/cider choice). But it looks like its activation and advertising is reaching outside the rugby segment into the general public. Great example here:

Awareness of Guinness ads among the wider population is up more than 50% since the Championship began. As the black stuff is currently the UK’s 6^th favourite beer/cider, it will be hoping that this increase in ad audience will see it move up the Current Customer metric rankings too.

Breaking America

The United States, with its appetite for collisions in sport, has often been mooted as the next big market for rugby. We’ve been tracking the Six Nations in the US to see how it performs.

Awareness of the Six Nations is fairly low among the general public – it’s in the same kind of company as the Cricket World Cup, Overwatch League and Drone Racing League.

But in terms of our Reputation metric (which specifically asks about the prestige of properties) the Six Nations climbs significantly, finding itself among the NBA G League and the FA Cup for company. If you filter to include only those people who are aware of the property, the Championship climbs to a remarkable 14^th position – that’s a great foundation for rightsholder to build on.

• BUZZ: a net score of whether respondents have heard something positive or negative about an event in the past two weeks)