The ESPN Sports Poll

The ESPN (Chilton) Sports Poll was created by Dr. Richard Luker in 1993 and launched on January 4, 1994. The Sports Poll was the first ongoing research service to measure sports fan interests, activities and preferences in the United States. In 1997, the influence of the Sports Poll was recognized by "Sporting News": "Luker's creation, the ESPN CHILTON poll, in less than three years has become the single most utilized sports intelligence service in the U.S., a staple now of sports organizations, media and sponsoring companies. His research provides timely data on sports fan interests and behaviors year round, which is an invaluable marketing tool. ["The Sporting News" 12-30-1996] ”

History [ An interview with Dr. Luker on 11/25/07]

Prior to 1994 there were no systematic measures of American sport fan bases. Those engaged in sports business would rely on the combination of attendance to events coupled with television ratings to arrive at rough estimates. However, it was not possible to describe the full fan experience. There was no way of telling how many NFL fans were also fans of the NBA. The individual leagues would do occasional studies but only measured the interests of their own fans.

It was the 1988 "'Major League Baseball on CBS" deal that would ultimately lose over $500 million that motivated Luker to investigate sports research in America [ A great story on sports media values in 1989 may be found in the "New York Times" July 23, 1989 "CBS HAS WON THE WORLD SERIES......NOW IT COULD LOSE ITS SHIRT" By LAURENCE SHAMES;LAURENCE SHAMES IS THE AUTHOR OF "THE HUNGER FOR MORE: SEARCHING FOR VALUES IN AN AGE OF GREED."] . A professor at Temple University at the time, Dr. Luker charged his doctoral students to find the data used to determine the value of baseball on television. After two rounds of searching they could find on systematic historical or ongoing studies of sports. Luker spent the next four years studying sports business and developing a research plan for monitoring U. S. sports interests.

In 1992 Luker joined Chilton Research Services (CRS) which was owned by Capital Cities Communications, owners of ESPN. In 1993 Luker developed and tested a sports poll concept that was approved as a cooperative project between CRS and ESPN in November, 1993. The poll was originally called “The ESPN CHILTON Sports Poll.” The Chilton name was dropped in 1998 when CRS was purchased by Taylor Nelson Sofres.

Luker was Founder and Executive Director from inception until October, 1997. He was succeeded by Dr. Daniel Kaiser in 1997, Tracy Schoneadl in 2000, and Robert Fox in 2007.

Idea Behind the Poll

The basic idea behind the poll was to capture the whole sports experience. The purpose of the poll was to provide a firm foundation for sports business decisions and an accurate measure of the grow and decline of sports in the United States. Luker felt it required four things to accurately do that. First, it had to be a scientific random sample of the entire U.S. population, not just “sports fans.” Only by capturing the entire population could one compare sports interests with other activities or baseline consumption of sponsor brands. Second, it had to capture all sports, not just a few. Otherwise it would not be possible to capture overlap in sports interests. According to Luker, for the life of the poll 12 sports have captured roughly 80% of all interest and the average American is a fan of 5-6 sports, a big fan of 2-3 sports. “There is no such thing as a football fan” Luker says. “We are all sports fans and choose our sports based on seasons and compelling stories just the way we prefer chicken one day and pizza the next.” Third, sports interests needed to measured all the time to capture changes in sports seasons. For that reason, Sports Poll data are collected 360 days a year to be able to account for changes in and out of a given sport season. Finally, interest in sports is multi-dimensional, not uni-dimensional, so it is important to capture all the ways people follow sport including: watching in person; attending; watching on TV: listening on the radio; following on the Internet; playing the sport; getting results from the newspaper, and others.

The challenge in creating the Sports Poll was in the shear amount of information needed to build a complete description. Luker solved this with a hierarchical telephone survey format that felt more like a discussion of sports than the typical survey research interview. The hierarchical approach meant the more a respondent liked sports, the longer the interview. The non-fan interviews averaged eight minutes in length. After core sports interest, demographic and consumer questions were asked non-fans were off the phone. On the other extreme, according to Luker, the longest interview was an hour and fifty minutes long. “The guy had season tickets for NBA, NHL, and college basketball at the same time.” The average interview – over 30 minutes – defies research standards but is understandable, Luker says, because these are people talking about something they like.

Included in topics covered by the Sports Poll: Favorite sport; fan and avid fan base by sport for 20+ different sports; favorite athletes by sport; favorite team by sport; amount and way of following sports; awareness of sponsorships; purchase of sports related products and services.

There is a growing body of evidence supporting the influence of The ESPN Sports Poll which has collected 1,000 – 2,000 interviews a month continuously since January 1994. The over 200,000 interviews and over 2,000 different questions on the Poll have led to reports that have been published in hundreds of newspapers and magazines. Sports marketing textbooks routinely include the Sports Poll and data [ "Sport Marketing" by Mullin, Hardy & Sutton. On page 9 of the first chapter they document the role of the Poll in measuring fan bases. ] [ Contemporary Sport Management By Janet B. Parks, Jerome Quarterman, Lucie Thibault Page 429 ] . And Seventy-five percent of the course grade for a university class was based on analysis of Sports Poll data [http://www.wvu.edu/~physed/branch/fall%202007/sm616sylfa07.pdf] .

In 1995, Luker made the first major presentation of sports research at the sports industry's largest annual conference at the time: the Sport Summit in New York. It was the only presentation of nearly 100 in the conference containing new data on the sports fan experience. In 1996, the Sport Summit awarded Dr. Luker and the ESPN Sports Poll "The comeback of the year" award. At the 2006 Sport Sponsorship Symposium, Abe Madkour, Executive Editor of the "Sports Business Journal" introduced Dr. Luker as the father of sports research. All the presentations at the conference that year contained data from new research conducted by a wide variety of market research companies.

References