As a southerner, I spend a disproportionate amount of my life thinking about college football and eating.  As any reader of Garden & Gun knows, the two of these come together each Saturday in the fall via the time-honored “tailgate” tradition¹.  During my undergrad at NC State, no game experience was complete without pregame spicy cajun chicken and sweet team from Bojangles.  And in grad school at the University of Texas, we would pick-up Salt Lick BBQ for our pregame celebrations².

In what has already been an exciting college football season, Week 3 of NCAA football brings some compelling, high-ranked match-ups.  In fact, each of the top three team in the country are playing other teams ranked in the top 20.  As millions of fans watch these games on TV, I have turned to the AffinityAnswers platform to examine the tailgate preferences of each of these college football powerhouses.  By examining the mutual affinities between these football programs and restaurants, we can see the top preferences of each of the teams’ fans for pregame meals.

Prior to sharing the results, let me describe our methodology…  At AffinityAnswers we start by ingesting the active, social engagements of the audiences of thousands of brands.  Then we use our algorithms to calculate a 0 to 10 “TrueAffinity™”³ score for each brand relationship.  The higher the TrueAffinity™ score, the more likely one brand’s audience is to engage with marketing content from the other brand.  So, below are the highest restaurant affinities for each of the current top three NCCA football teams and their opponents.

#1 is the Alabama Crimson Tide.  If visiting Tuscaloosa, your best bet is Dreamland Bar-B-Que.  But since the game this weekend is at Ole Miss, any fans visiting the Oxford / University area should check out McAlister’s Deli.

#2 is the Seminoles of Florida State.  Again, the highest True Affinity™ score is a BBQ joint – specifically Sonny’s Real Pit Bar-B-Q.  But this week the eatery of choice of the Louisville crowd is Tex Mex from Tumbleweed Southwest Grill.

And finally, #3, the Buckeyes from Ohio State.  When at home, Bob Evans is the top restaurant, but any traveling Buckeye would be wise to follow the Sooners lead and try the Rib Crib – the third BBQ joint on our list.

So, other than being in the know for where to eat in college towns, what does this mean?  For starters, these restaurants know that the fans of the associated football programs are great audience for their marketing.  In the digital world, they can even purchase these audiences (through our channel partner, Oracle Data Cloud) for their programmatic campaigns.  And the same methodology works at even larger scale.  A brand can build a target audience consisting of other brands’ audiences with high mutual affinities to achieve reach and relevance.

Want to know which brands your customers have in common with you? Contact us to find out how.

1. Garden & Gun is very serious about tailgating.
2. Each of these examples have the highest restaurant industry mutual affinity (as measured by TrueAffinity™) with the respective schools, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I have even explained TrueAffinity™ yet.
3. TrueAffinity is our proprietary measurement of mutual affinity. More details about it are here.

*The top picture is of the author from a tailgate when NC State played the University of Texas in Austin in 1999.