Last week MillerCoors signed a three-year deal with FX Networks to place its beer brands on shows on the FX, FXX, and FXM channels. In a minute, we’ll talk about how this partnership could benefit from using social affinity to find the best fits between specific MillerCoors beer brands and specific FX Networks programs. But first let’s take a look at the rationale behind the deal.

Targeting Audience Segments with Relevant Content

This is an exclusive deal for product placements, not just advertising or other sponsorships, which brings key benefits for both parties:

• Unlike advertisements, product placements will live on after the FX shows — Sons of Anarchy, The Americans, and so on — go into syndication.
• The young men in the core FX demographic — a prime beer-drinking audience — hate to sit through ads. Product placement gets around that: just imagine Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, who play the central couple of Soviet spies in The Americans, sipping 1980s-vintage bottles of Miller Lite. The product is there in front of you, but without interrupting the drama.
• A big deal like this puts extra money in FX’s hands up-front, which helps them defray the high production costs of shows like Fargo or The Americans.

The different pieces of this rationale are spelled out thoroughly in articles like this one from Anthony Crupi at AdWeek:

FX Networks, MillerCoors in 3-Year Partnership Deal

As Crupi points out, this deal builds on an earlier agreement that has placed MillerCoors brands on the FX programs Sons of Anarchy and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. As other analyses noted, FX has also done similar deals with the TNT and TBS networks at Turner.

Audience Demographics: Strengths and Limitations

If you read through the AdWeek article and this one from Brian Steinberg at Variety, you’ll notice the focus on the demographics of the FX Networks audience. It’s quite understandable: broadcasters like FX and big consumer-facing companies like MillerCoors have spent decades refining their understanding of demographics to help them better target their audience, whether to draw in more viewers for Fargo or get more people to drink Coors Light.

Our company’s experience in analyzing social affinities, however, keeps showing us that demographics only go so far. We’ll have to save a full treatment of this subject for another day, but for now just consider that demographics alone would suggest that multiple FX Networks shows would appeal to 18-34-year old men. Period. In fact, though, there’s a lot more to it than that, as we’ll see in the social affinity analysis below.

Mind you, the smart marketers at FX and MillerCoors know that there’s variation within their audience demographics, but in the past there was only so much information they could get their hands to refine their targeting further.

Matching Brands to Shows Using Social Affinities

That’s where social affinities come in. Using social affinities, and especially our algorithm for mutual affinity, we can see in detail which FX Networks shows actually match up best with which MillerCoors beer brands. Keep in mind that this isn’t based on demographic guesswork: it grows out of detailed analysis of the affinities that consumers express through their actual behaviors on social networks.

Let’s start with the FX shows that MillerCoors has already been involved with. Sons of Anarchy looks pretty good for them: the top ten beer brands for the show, ranked by mutual affinity, are:

1. Budweiser
2. Heineken
3. Pabst Blue Ribbon
4. Coors Light
5. Dogfish Head
6. Sierra Nevada
7. Stone Brewing Co.
8. Miller Lite
9. New Belgium Brewing
10. Yuengling

MillerCoors brands are in bold. It’s not the best news for MillerCoors that Budweiser and Heineken are sitting at #1 and #2, but it’s a solid showing among two big independent brewers (Pabst and Yuengling) and a bunch of craft brewers.

How about It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia? That picture isn’t so rosy:

1. Sierra Nevada
2. Pabst Blue Ribbon
3. Dogfish Head
4. Rogue Ales
5. Stone Brewing Co.
6. New Belgium Brewing
7. Brooklyn Brewery
8. Yuengling
9. SweetWater Brewery
10. Anchor Brewing Co.

The good news is that none of MillerCoors’ biggest competitors are in the top 10. (Budweiser sits at #11, Heineken at #17.) The bad news is that you have to go all the way down to #26 before you get to Miller Lite, and to #28 for Coors Light. None of their other beers make the mutual affinity list for the show at all.

Now, obviously, MillerCoors wouldn’t do this new deal if they didn’t think they had gotten good value from the old one. But it would be worth it for them to track changes in social affinity over time to see what impact the partnership is having in terms of audience members’ social behaviors. That analysis could get even juicier over time, since FX and MillerCoors plan to enhance their fan outreach through social media channels.

Using Social Affinity to Pick the Best Bets for Partnerships

Meanwhile, which FX and FXX shows are the ripest, in terms of social affinity, for MillerCoors product placements? When we use the Affinity Answers app to rate FX Networks shows for affinity, the top three are:

1. The League
2. Sons of Anarchy
3. Anger Management

The League, by the way, is especially strong for both Miller Lite and Coors Lite, maybe because of its sports-related theme. Other shows, however, including popular ones such as American Horror Story and Archer (not to mention It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) don’t rate high enough in affinity to warrant special attention from MillerCoors.

Clearly, FX and MillerCoors could find ways to move the needle on social affinity using smart product placement within popular shows that are on the rise. We’ve seen something similar happen before with well-thought-out sponsorships at our client companies. In fact, tracking improvements in social affinity over time is one key way of evaluating the overall effectiveness of the sponsorship.

If that analysis demonstrates that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a losing proposition for your brand — well, that’s something you want to know, right? Meanwhile, the kind of analysis we’ve touched on in this post, even though it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what social affinity is capable of, can point the way to the shows that are the likeliest candidates for getting fans engaged around a sponsoring brand.

How could you put social affinity analysis to use to better understand and engage your fans?