Measure whether an event or ad blitz shifted attitudes or behaviors

The task

After every big media moment, someone asks whether it worked. A tournament with wall-to-wall advertising, a product launch, a controversy: did it change how people feel?

Beneath this question, there are two deeper ones:

• Did the category move?

• Did your brand move within it?

Being able to answer both of those questions is key for clients looking to monitor their brand’s health. Because Morning Consult tracks brands and category behavior on the same daily instrument, the AI Connector can answer both in one conversation.

Ask how views have shifted around the event, and the answer comes back with the category average and the individual brands on one timeline, so the lift (or its absence) is visible against the backdrop. For a marketing or communications team, that’s the post-campaign read: here’s what moved and here’s what didn’t.

Prompt

Can you use Morning Consult data to tell me how views of sports gambling have shifted? Curious if the World Cup — which ran from June 11 to July 19 — had any impact given the high number of advertisements.

The result

The AI tool pulls monthly favorability for the sports-betting category (the average across the twelve sportsbook brands Morning Consult tracks) and for the biggest individual brands, January through September 2026, and reads them against the tournament window. The honest answer is that the World Cup didn’t move the category.

Separating the brand from audience behavior

Morning Consult doesn’t just track brand perceptions. We track audience behavior and economic and political sentiment, as well. So, with a quick follow-up we can ask if the share of consumers who gamble or bet on sports changed at all.

Prompt

What about audience behavior? Did the share of consumers who bet or gamble on sports change at all?

The share of adults who say they bet on sports rose from about 26% in January and February to 31% in May, and it has stayed around 29% to 31% since. That’s a five-point increase, which is a lot of new bettors, but look at the timing: the climb happened in April and May, before the World Cup kicked off on June 11. You can find the likely explanation behind this chart in the sports calendar: the NBA and NHL playoffs in April and May, and the NFL season in September. The World Cup landed in a seasonal lull.

Natural next questions from here:

• “Cut FanDuel’s June bump by age and gender.”

• “Did awareness or buzz move even if favorability didn’t? Show all three for the top brands across the tournament.”

• “Compare this to the same months last year, so I can separate a World Cup effect from a normal summer pattern.”

Keep in mind

Name the event and its dates when necessary. “The World Cup” is enough for the tool to find the window, but stating it (“June 11 to July 19”) removes any doubt about which months count as during, before and after, and makes the result reproducible.

Ask for the category and the brands together. A brand line alone can’t tell you whether a move was yours. Asking for the category average on the same chart turns a trend into a comparison, which is the only way to claim a lift.

Let a flat line be the answer. Sometimes the honest result is that nothing moved, and a tool that says so, with the sample sizes to back it, is more useful than one that finds a story that isn’t there.