To understand just how gripping Indy 500 racing is, Fox will have a group of viewers—both at home and within The Brickyard—wearing biometric trackers on their hands this Sunday. By measuring sweat gland activity, the broadcaster hopes to demonstrate the unique pull of high-octane sports and optimize its presentation for maximum engagement in a world of distraction.
Fox has been running similar experiments for multiple years with Portuguese media measurement company Mediaprobe, having previously conducted tests with viewers in laboratory environments.
“A lot of the motivation for us to do this project and to work with Mediaprobe generally is that people are unreliable narrators,” Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Michael Mulvihill said. “And so, if you can move into measuring involuntary responses, I think you’re just getting something that is more reliable, hopefully more insightful, and it might just be a richer data set.”
Mediaprobe readouts from the Fox-broadcasted 2025 Super Bowl could impact how the company covers its next big game in 2029, Mulvihill added. Behavioral fan data also serves to entice advertisers to spend more on sports. TV ratings only tell part of the story.
