College football postseason sponsors have ‘exceptional’ unaided brand recall

College football fans may never forget the final score from certain January match-ups. They may also be able to recall the names of the brands that showed up in some of those games.

Many major brands associated with college football “continued to see exceptional unaided brand association” as a result of their ads and sponsorships, according to Big Chalk, a marketing analytics company.

In a survey, Big Chalk asked more than 900 people who watched at least one college football bowl game or playoff game last season if they could name any of the sponsor brands without looking at a list. The company fielded the survey Jan. 29 and Jan. 30, three to four weeks after some of the games in question.

Name that brand: Nike had the highest unaided brand recall of the college football postseason sponsors, according to Big Chalk’s report, which is the second in a two-part series analyzing perceptions of college sports. More than 10% of respondents named Nike, followed by more than 7% who recalled Tostitos.

Nike has an advantage given how embedded the brand is in sports culture, according to Rick Miller, head of Big Chalk’s marketing effectiveness practice.

“You see their logo sometimes in the stadiums when the cameras are panning around because they sponsor everything,” Miller told Marketing Brew. “They’re just everywhere.”

• Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Gatorade rounded out the top five at 5.6%, 5.5%, and 4.5% recall.
• Allstate and Capital One, both longtime NCAA partners, each saw 4.1% unaided recall.
• AT&T, Chick-fil-A, and Dr Pepper completed the top 10.

While these percentages might seem small, “high unaided recall is considered the pinnacle of brand development,” especially for CPG brands, according to Big Chalk. It’s hard for consumers to recall brands without any assistance, so one percentage point of aided recall can be equivalent to as many as 15 points of unaided, Miller said.

Alternate route: Several of the college football advertisers seeing high unaided recall have been showing up in that space for years, Miller said. But not every company can afford a college football sponsorship or ad inventory, nevermind many years over.

But, fans who said they prefer to watch sports like hockey, baseball, lacrosse, track and field, and others over men’s basketball and football—along with women’s sports—also seem to be paying pretty close attention to sponsors.

• More than 19% of that group said that if they remember a brand that sponsored a sport they love, they would prioritize that brand while shopping.
• A similar share (15%) of women’s sports fans said the same.
• Those shares were slightly lower among all college sports fans (13.3%), basketball fans (12.9%), and football fans (9.2%).

“There’s opportunity there,” Miller said. “It doesn’t cost as much to sponsor the track and field championships as it does to sponsor the college football playoffs, but the people who watch those sports are really engaged.”