Nike again earned the top spot in SportsPro’s second annual list of the World’s 50 Most Marketable (50MM) Brands powered by Hookit.
Adidas came second in the standings. Emirates, Santander and Red Bull rounded out the top five. Puma, State Farm, Monster Energy, Dream11, and Heineken completed the top ten.
Hookit’s methodology for assessing sponsorship value uses vision technology to track the social activity of major professional athletes, teams and leagues. To arrive at the total value received by each brand, Hookit examined two key metrics—potential value and promotion quality—which were multiplied together to determine a discounted adjusted ad value (AAV).
For this year’s ranking, all social and digital posts from professional athletes, teams, leagues, events, and venues between August 15, 2020 and August 15, 2021 were examined for brand promotion. More than 30,000 sports organizations and athletes posted during this period, promoting over 8,000 brands across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, VK, Weibo, and YouTube.
Nike led the data with more than 8.77 billion engagements on social media posts promoting its brand in a single year, giving a total sponsorship value worth $616.5 million to beat Adidas’ earned value by more than $270 million.
Having topped SportsPro’s list last year, Nike’s total represented a 58 percent increase in branded engagements and a 34 percent increase in sponsorship value received compared to 2020.
Photo courtesy Nike
