What the best metric in sports analytics tells marketers about ad effectiveness

Joel Rubinson

Looks at advertising effectiveness through the lens of WAR, or ‘Wins Above Replacement’, a stat used in sports.

“Wins Above Replacement” (known as WAR) is the best stat in sports because it is an incrementality measure… a player’s WAR is an estimate of how many more games his team will win because he is on the team instead of a substitute who plays the same position. If you add up the WARs of all players on a team, there is a linear formula for predicting team wins.

In the National Football League, the difference in WAR of a great quarterback versus a mediocre one is critical to a team making the playoffs. In baseball, players such as the...

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