The topic was what kind of exposure did the 2021 NCAA baseball championship bring Mississippi State and by way of introduction, MSU Chief Communications Officer Sid Salter engaged in a game of word association.
“If you went to North Dakota and said, ‘Mississippi State,’ what’s the first thing that person would say back to you?’” Salter asked during his appearance at the Starkville Rotary Club meeting at Hilton Garden Inn on Monday.
Across the room, came a smattering of responses. “Dak Prescott” was the prevailing answer.
Salter, himself an MSU graduate, seemed to anticipate the response.
“If you ask the average Mississippi State fan who is the best-known symbol of MSU, it’s probably going to be Dak,” he said. “But based on Google Analytics, you would be wrong. In fact, you would be a lot wrong.”
Ever since the final out was recorded in the Bulldogs’ 9-0 win over Vanderbilt that gave MSU its first-ever NCAA team championship on June 30, MSU has enjoyed an exposure not matched since the MSU football team’s five-week stay as No. 1 in the nation in 2014.
In an effort to quantify that exposure, while admitting that it’s an inexact science, Salter turned to Google Analytics and Cision, an analytics company MSU uses regularly.
Based on Google Analytics, MSU’s seven games in the College World Series, broadcast on ESPN, netted for MSU the equivalent of $96.6 million in advertising exposures, another $27 million in exposure on the SEC Network, through its pre-game and post-game shows and title game rebroadcasts, and another $1.25 million from mentions on ABC’S Good Morning America, hosted by Mississippi native Robin Roberts.
“That’s an estimated $125 million in television exposure alone, but it goes farther than TV,” Salter said, circling back to the word-association question he posed at the beginning of his talk.
“According to Google Analytics, a search for Mississippi State and the 2021 College World Series Champions produced 586 million hits,” he said, noting that a search for Mississippi State baseball yielded another 46 million hits. “Mississippi State and Dak Prescott, if you’re wondering, came in at 2 million.”
Salter said Cision analytics showed the College World Series produced another $18.2 million from mentions in digital media and associated platforms.
“The total media equivalence value of the national championship is $143.6 million,” Salter estimated. “Anybody who tells you that winning a national championship isn’t good for business is not paying attention. It was a tremendous moment for the university across the board and in everything we do.”
Salter didn’t offer any estimate on championship merchandise sales.
“If you doubt that, all I would say is go in any retail establishment in town and somebody will let you buy some piece of that,” he said. “And if they don’t, come to campus and we will.”
In another way, the impact of the CWS title cannot be measured or even estimated, Salter said.
“The most important thing was the next morning, that coffee tasted a little better,” he said. “When you saw your neighbors at church that Sunday morning, you felt a little friendlier. Winning that championship and getting that monkey off our collective backs was an amazing feeling. It made a difference in how our students, faculty, staff alumni and fans felt about themselves. Everybody was just a little bit prouder to be a Bulldog.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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