How New Zealand Rugby Monitors a Global Brand with Truescope

At a Glance

• Challenge: New Zealand Rugby needed a platform that met the demands required of a national sport and global and iconic sporting brands.
• Solution: Truescope provides always-on monitoring across their key markets, with AI-powered research and evaluation in one platform.
• Impact: The team tracks sentiment by market in real time, tailors responses for domestic and international audiences, and reports results with confidence.

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The Company

New Zealand Rugby (NZR) is the governing body for rugby in New Zealand and home to the All Blacks and Black Ferns. The organisation spans the full game, from grassroots participation to elite international competition. As a global sports brand, NZR is engaging fans across New Zealand, the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and Europe.

Paul Stevens is NZR’s Chief Communications Officer, leading a team of nine across all parts of the organisation: community rugby, stakeholder engagement, high performance, corporate services and fan engagement.

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The Challenge

‍Global brand, limited global media intelligence

NZR had used other media monitoring providers, but finding one platform that could research, monitor, and evaluate communications at a global scale proved difficult. Most providers could handle daily reporting, but few offered all three capabilities in a single platform, let alone across every market NZR operates in.

As Paul explains, "What we say to New Zealanders about our national sport may differ from what we say internationally, particularly when we are looking to connect rugby with new fans and our global commercial partners." For a communications team, managing coverage across multiple continents, the ability to break down insights by market was essential.

Generating deep-dive insights and research that informed communications strategies often required the communications team to out-source that work. "A lot of other platforms, to do deep dives or specific analysis, required someone to do desk research for us. That's significantly more expensive when someone is quite literally analysing thousands of pieces of content," said Paul.

NZR ran a formal procurement process, evaluating over a dozen providers before narrowing to a final three.

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The Solution

Always-on monitoring across their key markets

NZR chose Truescope for its AI functionality, global coverage, cost-effectiveness, and responsive support. Onboarding was straightforward: the team received training and support setting up dashboards and topics, and were self-sufficient quickly.

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Day to day, the team tracks coverage across their national teams, competitions such as Super Rugby, key spokespeople, and specialist topics like brain health and concussion. Critically, they break this down by market, comparing coverage and sentiment across New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Europe. The AI summarisation tools help the team quickly interpret shifts in sentiment or coverage spikes in any market.

The relationship with the Truescope team has been a standout. Wherever the team identified a gap or improvement, Truescope delivered. As Paul puts it, "There's a real sense that where we have found something that the platform doesn't provide, or an improvement, Truescope's really delivered on that."

"Truescope is a robust, cost-effective platform that gives great insights and allows us to be strategic as a comms team."
— Paul Stevens, Chief Communications Officer, New Zealand Rugby

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The Impact

Market-level sentiment tracking and board-ready reporting

The clearest impact has been in how NZR is provided with insights from the Truescope platform that matter. The team understands and responds to coverage across its key markets and can see the success of communications strategies in real time.

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The recent appointment of the All Blacks head coach brought this to life. The team monitored sentiment in real time during the crucial first 48 hours after the announcement. Positive sentiment hit 51%, compared to the All Blacks' usual 33% baseline, with sentiment tied to the new head coach reaching 70%. Over 150 unique authors generated content globally, and 25% of coverage came from the United States, a critical growth market for NZR. That geographic breakdown gave the NZR Executive and Board clear evidence of how the announcement landed beyond New Zealand.

Truescope has also reduced reliance on outsourcing in-depth analysis which can be expensive to commission. The team can now run deep-dive analysis on niche topics in-platform with Truescope, lowering costs while expanding global monitoring scope.