Blinkfire Inventory Manager Offers All-inclusive Partnership Suite
Say you’re a professional sports team looking for insights into your sponsorship inventory, or a brand planning a promotional campaign. Or even, as the era of player empowerment has ushered in new NCAA rules on name, image and likeness — a college athlete seeking a first brand partnership. In all these cases, the Blinkfire Inventory Manager has a tool that can help.
Launched just over a year ago, Inventory Manager is an all-in-one partnership management tool built using Blinkfire’s proprietary artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology.
Since its inception, the tool has grown to offer a litany of tools including rate cards, inventory lists, campaign management and most importantly the ability to find all those tools on one platform as an end-to-end solution. According to Blinkfire Founder Steve Olechowski, they’re only just getting started.
“Our mission is to be on the desktop of everyone in the sports business organization, as well as having the real-time data available for their sponsors,” Olechowski said. “We think Blinkfire is already a necessary part of providing data to a sales team to help increase revenue tenfold, so you will see our suite of features expand.”
The Tampa Bay Lightning have been a Blinkfire customer for years now, signing on this month to its entire suite, according to Allie MacLeod, Senior Manager, Market Intelligence. Since its debut, the Blinkfire Inventory Manager has stood out as one of her team’s most essential tools.
“Having a one-stop shop for end-to-end needs when it comes to social, that emphasizes content and being able to provide world-class reporting internally and to our partners; it was a no-brainer,” MacLeod said. “I just can’t even get over how much we get for what we pay.”
Social media was long been an untapped well of partnership value for teams, MacLeod said, but with the industry quickly realizing the importance of social, tools like the inventory manager are only increasing in value.
“In an arena there are 19,092 seats, that many eyeballs,” said MacLeod, “but on social — the bounds are limitless.”
MacLeod said that when COVID hit, the entire organization began to focus on developing content for their audience to maintain engagement while fans were home. That’s where Blinkfire came in.
“With content being such a huge focus, you need the right tools behind it to ensure that you’re putting the right content out there,” MacLeod said. “Being able to track all of the stuff we’re doing in Inventory Manager, apply real-time ad rates to it and then being able to see how all of our campaigns are doing, against each other but also against all of the campaigns in Blinkfire — it’s huge.”
“You’re seeing these huge numbers, especially on social, while TV viewership diminishes,” agreed Blinkfire Vice President, Marketing, Alexis Prousis. “There’s definitely been that shift that we’ve seen over the last two years with the pandemic.”
Prousis was a tennis pro before joining Blinkfire and saw firsthand the need for transparent valuation tools in the partnership space. Now, Prousis said, athletes are more selective in the brands they partner with, wanting to really connect with a brand and its mission.
“I truly think that Blinkfire can help them, because it’s not going to be a grab bag of, ‘Oh, I’ll work with these 80 brands,’ it’s like, ‘No, I’m going to be very selective and work with these five, but I’m going to come with the data behind me and why I’m a good fit,’” Prousis said.
According to MacLeod, Blinkfire’s tools have helped the organization in countless moments. Through Blinkfire, MacLeod noticed that the team’s birthday posts, which were attached to a lower-value sponsor at the time, were generating considerably more value than the sponsor’s investment. That information allowed the team to match those posts to a new, higher-paying sponsor to match value, she said.
“A lot of other companies have tried to pitch us their stuff,” MacLeod said. “There are so many more capabilities in Blinkfire, and so much that you can do outside of just getting this report on this specific sponsor.”
Macleod also used Blinkfire’s inventory manager to refocus the Lightning’s “trigger promotions” — partnerships in which a brand attaches fan giveaways to teams hitting certain benchmarks — by comparing the team’s own post to more successful posts by other teams, helping the Lightning stay ahead of the curve.
No matter how you use it, Prousis said the Blinkfire Inventory Manager offers rights holders and brands on both sides of a partnership agreement essential information on partnership valuation, helping make a better deal for everyone.
“It’s a single source of truth.”
