NRG Esports on why it's gone ‘all-in’ on user analytics
VP of Audience & Analytics Sean Cohen explains why its monthly reports on NRG fans are invaluable to the entire industry.
The reasons why LA-based esports organization NRG Esports began releasing reports on user analytics in May might surprise some; typically a company creating cohorts of consumers to poll about their behaviors, preferences, and opinions, and collating those findings into something coherent on a monthly basis surely has to have some sort of monetary play attached to it. Not this time, says NRG.
Founded in 2015 by 24 Hour Fitness CEO Mark Mastrov and Sacramento Kings Co-Owner Andy Miller, NRG's core business focus is competitive gaming and content creation. The company operates rosters competing in the top esports leagues in the world including Overwatch (San Francisco Shock), Rocket League (The General NRG), Apex Legends, Fortnite, and Valorant. The company has also signed a number of notable content creators/influencers across YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok.
Sean Cohen, vice president of audience & analytics at NRG, told me last week in an interview that the idea to gather data and create these reports was born out of ongoing conversations with the analytics team and CEO Andy Miller.
Cohen, who joined NRG in 2021, might be a bit overqualified when it comes to data analysis; he spent nearly 10 years in senior roles at Microsoft spearheading analytics for sales and insights efforts to optimize search, entertainment, and advertising; and then six years at Red Bull in similar senior roles that focused on using learnings to create better, more optimized content.
How it Started
The idea of these monthly reports from NRG Insights came about naturally, through regular conversations within Cohen's analytics division, and parallel dialogue with Miller.
"This actually started as an internal conversation on our analytics team," Cohen told me. "We'd been talking about this because we do a lot when it comes to internal optimization of our content and looking at all the data that we get from our social platforms. We got to this place where we really understood things like how many views, impressions, and engagements we were getting [on our content], but our social data doesn't really answer the question of 'why' people like our content, engage with NRG, or why gamers have the habits that they do and like the games that they like. So we really wanted to turn this into a larger conversation to be able to answer those questions.”
After speaking with Miller, finding agreement, and working with him to put together a business proposal, Cohen secured the budget needed to build out the research tools and they were all off to the races.
Miller offered a similar opinion when asked why NRG wanted to start digging into its audience: “We started NRG Insights as an internal effort to better get to know our fans and overall audience across the many platforms in which we publish content. NRG monthly reach has grown so significantly that we felt the data we were getting back would help ‘demystify’ the gamer and be useful for the industry as a whole so we put together the themed monthly insight newsletter and opened it up to everyone."
Cohen had proposed publishing a monthly analytics newsletter containing an infographic specifically, which was something he thinks most people in the industry are used to getting in their inbox. Both he and Miller were very familiar with this type of experience in their previous jobs and decided that these reports and that data collection would "really differentiate NRG as thought leaders" within the research and gaming spaces.
How NRG Collects Data
To collect this data and turn it into a regularly released, easily digestible monthly report, Cohen and his team created what he calls "fan panels," or sample groups broken out into categories such as general population, gamers, and “NRG fans.”
NRG recruits people into its fan panels in a variety of ways including in-person events, email, and other forms of digital recruitments, and conducts its own research, for the most part; sometimes the company has to lean into working with third-party research providers when the scale and scope requires it or its needs to reach a specific audience.
"When we say 'fan panels,' what we're actually talking about is just groups of people who self-identify into these certain panels that are done basically anytime you run research–you end up running these pre-screen type questions and people can self-identify," explained Cohen. "And so what we're doing is basically allowing the people that we reach to self-identify into panels for video game fans or NRG fans, as examples, all based off of the behavior."
The real purpose of these panels, according to Cohen, is to allow NRG to talk to people about specific research it wants to do. It also allows the team to analyze the data from one panel and compare it to other groups to see if there is any kind of overlap. Generally, when it comes to using the terms "gamers" and "NRG fans" for reports (in what seems to be an interchangeable manner), Cohen notes that this is because the organization's core demo is 18-34 year-old men living in the United States–a demo that also represents/overlaps with the "gamers" it is polling.
"If I have a panel of NRG fans and a panel of video game fans, and then our general population, I'm able to really start to talk to those people in different ways and better understand their interests and behaviors," he said. "We're identifying NRG fans as those who self identify as 'fans of NRG' that are part of that panel, and then gamers. What we often see is that the stats actually matched each other where the NRG fans and the general male 18-34 gaming population had similar opinions."
That overlap really depends on the topic at hand, Cohen notes. For example, in its July report talking about automobiles, NRG found that there were some key differences between NRG fans and the general gaming population:
"You see a lot of times that overlap in that the data is exactly the same--70% here and 70% there—and other times we've done surveys where it is different; in the autos newsletter, there was a big difference when it came to the NRG fans and their desire for autonomous vehicles compared to that of the general gaming population of male 18-34 gamers. It really depends on the topic.
“We found that anytime you speak to the esports audience (and ours being a pretty hardcore esports audience), you can kind of start to assume that this question is probably going to lean heavier into something that we know is really strong within the male audience, or really strong within the gaming audience.”
Using an endemic topic as an example–such as preferences on gaming headsets–Cohen notes that NRG’s research would probably show a much higher over index for whatever the questions the team is asking when talking to NRG fans versus that of the general gaming audience that has been defined.
“So for this example [autos], it just happened that this was one of those questions that the two audiences were [mostly] very similar in."
While NRG’s research does tend to focus on U.S. males 18-34 years old because it represents its core demo, Cohen says that it does collect data from other segments (such as gamers/NRG fans that are 35-years-old or older and women). He also said that the work the company is doing is still in its early stages, and that figuring out how to utilize data when it makes sense to cover other demographics is something the analytics team is constantly thinking about and discussing.
What Drives NRG’s Research Plans
NRG has no plans to monetize its insights in any way, according to Cohen; the only play here is to better understand its audience’s preferences, opinions, and behaviors.
“We aren't monetizing this data at all; it's just about cementing NRG as subject matter experts or thought leaders,” he said. “However, when it comes to understanding the gaming and esports audience, that is the current place [we’re at] right now. It's not something that requires some sort of monetization to justify its existence.“
Cohen also said that this data isn’t being used as a value-add for any of its partners and that partners and other sponsors have no hand in directing what his team is researching in any given month. “We also aren't using our newsletter or infographic–the current insights newsletter–as a sales line item for partners or clients either.”
Partners for its main NRG-branded teams include The General, BUFF, Rockstar Energy Drink, The Army National Guard, Levi's, Hot Pockets, and THERAGUN by Therabody. San Francisco Shock has an additional sponsorship deal with AM PM, while NRG's Rocket League team has a special naming rights deal with The General–a partnership born out of its relationship with NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal, who is also an investor in NRG and a prominent national spokesperson for the U.S.-based automobile insurance company.
“Our research is solely based on internal conversations of topics that are relevant to us or our industry and that are timely and topical in the moment,” Cohen said. “I think if you look back on our three newsletters [so far], you'll see that those topics are pretty topical and relevant. When I look at our topics going forward, my guidance is not coming from any partners, third-parties, or any monetization plan; it’s solely about what is the most interesting thing I can talk about next month and in a way that is beneficial for our organization to have a point of view on.”
When presented with a hypothetical question about one of its partners–The General in my example–approaching NRG to do some research on insurance purchasing habits, Cohen said that the company would reject such overtures.
“We would say, ’no, the newsletter is not there for that.’ And if there is research that any partner wants to work with us on, that's exclusively different and from a separate deliverable that you would work with. That is why there are third parties like Nielsen and others to satisfy partner requirements–the newsletter is not to satisfy partner requirements, it is there for our specific positioning of our company in the industry.”
Finally, when asked if NRG is keeping any of the data it collects “to itself” for its own personal use, Cohen said that, while there are surveys the company runs that don’t see the light of of day (because the results are negligible or miss the mark in some way that makes it not useful to the topic at hand), it does use the data it collects and releases publicly to inform its own decisions in a variety of ways.
“The data that we're finding, the insights, we talk about them the week after they publish internally in our weekly all-hands meetings and anything that we uncover that's important for any member of our teams on the partnership, sales, content side trickle in and inform some of those decisions. There are plenty of surveys that we run that are never used, because they either don't make the final cut (they're not statistically significant) or we end up shifting what our focus is based on the things we learn.”
NRG Insights releases a new report the second Tuesday of every month. So far, reports have covered automobile purchasing opinions, NFTs, the metaverse, web3, cryptocurrency, music discoverability within games, and in-game concerts. NRG’s next report should drop on Aug. 9.
Didn't know this kind of thing existed! Really interesting to see what teams are doing internally, and I like the attitude of "this doesn't need to be monetized for it to be valuable." That's generally how teams get ahead - doing things because they like it, and find it valuable, without immediately thinking it needs to be leveraged for overall gain. Doing so puts so much pressure on the team finding their legs to make it saleable, and that'll kill the enthusiasm for the whole thing.