Hookit was founded in 2001 by two former athletes and long-time friends Scott Tilton and RJ Kraus. Initially founded in their hometown back east, the two picked up and relocated the company to sunny San Diego in early 2003 in a motorhome. The original mission was to help amateur athletes connect with sponsors through the internet, which was a revolutionary concept at the time. As the internet and social media exploded onto the scene over the past two decades, so has Hookit.
The founders saw a huge opportunity to evolve the original business model and refocus its efforts on becoming a data and analytics company in 2013. Today, Hookit is the leading sponsorship analytics platform for sports and pioneered a global AI-powered spontech platform empowering brands to improve the performance and effectiveness of their sponsorships.
Why We Exist
Social and digital media have completely transformed how fans consume and engage with sports as well as the opportunities to maximize sponsorship value. As a result, a vast majority of sponsorship value had gone unmeasured. Our mission is to improve global sponsorship effectiveness by providing the most comprehensive, trusted source of intelligent data so sports marketers can make smarter investment decisions.Sports sponsorship is a $160B+ industry and the way investments have been measured historically is totally outdated. What was once a reactive, assumptive based approach is now data-driven intelligence using real-time data, machine learning, and AI to analyze how sponsorships are performing and, more importantly, where investments should be made in the future to achieve maximum ROI.
How We Do It
As social & digital media have the most in-depth data ever available, we use these media platforms as a proxy for overall sponsorship value. We actively track nearly 500,000 entities in sport across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo, and VK. Every post is aggregated and analyzed for fan engagement and brand promotion via mentions, hashtags and brand logos using computer vision technology to analyze every photo and video. The award-winning Hookit Valuation Model (HVM) and proprietary sponsorship KPIs are trusted by some of the largest global brands who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their sponsorship portfolios annually.
