How media intelligence metrics show the success of Hamilton’s rendition of the national anthem at the Giants Opening Day Game

Baseball fans are used to promotions: bobblehead giveaways, gourmet food, celebrities singing the national anthem and fireworks nights. For Opening Day in San Francisco, the Giants recruited the hottest ticket in Broadway to sing the national anthem: the cast of “Hamilton”. In an age where every sporting event is now televised, sports franchises have had to come up with increasingly creative ways to persuade fans to part with their hard earned cash and attend sporting events live. A large aspect of these endeavors has been to increase the experience outside of the actual game — and attract more casual fans.

How can the Giants measure the impact of the impact of Hamilton’s performance at the game? Media Intelligence. By filtering social intelligence data so that only information around the promotion is shown, marketing teams can layer social information on top of other business metrics to see if there is any correlation.

Hashtags Highlight Hamilton’s Popularity

Hashtags focused on the musical were the seventh and ninth most popular hashtags to appear in the San Francisco Giants Hashtag Cloud on Opening Day, indicating the appearance of the cast garnered the kind of attention the Giants marketing department had been hoping for.

hashtag cloud for the SF Giants using media intelligence

Hamilton Drives Early Game Media Traffic

Greater insight into the success of the promotion can be seen when filtering the data so that only mentions of the cast can be seen. Of the 25,000 of the mentions of the Giants on Opening Day, 2.7% were directly attributed to having the cast of “Hamilton” sing the national anthem. This percentage could have been much higher if star player Buster Posey hadn’t been injured during the game. Mentions of the promotion peaked right around when the national anthem was sung, with a peak of 42 mentions over a 15 minute period, while the majority of the conversation around the cast’s appearance was positive.

SF Giants historical mentions from media intelligence

Inside Jokes + Instagram = powerful results

In anticipation of the cast’s appearance, the Giants posted a picture on Instagram featuring three jerseys with the names of the three female leads on the back: “Angelica”, “Eliza”, “And Peggy”.  “And Peggy” is a reference to a popular joke from the musical as Peggy is constantly overshadowed by the other two leads. The Instagram post gained traction in the media with outlets who wouldn’t normally cover the Giants day to day activities, like Mashable, picking up the story.

trending stories using media inelligence

The Instagram post from the San Francisco Giants was also the top trending image when data around the Giants was filtered down to only show media posts around the national anthem.

Sports teams generate an extremely large amount of noise across the media, which makes gleaning useful insights from media intelligence data a challenging proposition. By quickly filtering down this information to isolate data around key events, campaigns and issues, marketing teams can determine how much of a driver these are for key business metrics.