Wow.
…and to think that I almost didn’t watch Super Bowl 51.
I’m not a huge football (American) fan and I don’t need to watch the Super Bowl, like I need to watch the World Cup. But since I won my fantasy football league this year, I was a little more excited about football than usual.
…but I’m glad I did! The New England Patriots made the biggest Super Bowl comeback ever and Brady won his 5th Super Bowl, the most of any quarterback in history.
Greatest Of All Time.
Of course, then one of my next thoughts was: “I wonder if Tom Brady has an app?”
As far as we can tell, Tom Brady doesn’t have his own official app, nor is one in the works. Maybe when he retires, he will consider doing something like what Kim Kardashian or Jason Statham have done.
Since Tom doesn’t have his own app, we were curious to see what kind of Tom Brady apps are out there and how they are taking advantage of this historic win.
Here’s what we discovered…
Tom Brady Apps
Creating a Tom Brady app that is not officially licensed by Tom Brady or the NFL, can be really tricky. One legal mistake and the app developers will have wasted a ton of time on the development of the app and might even be sued.
So how the app developers create apps based on an athlete and team that they love, without getting into trouble? Or are all of these apps fully licensed?
Well, here is what we discovered about these apps on the App Store and the Play Store.
Note: You can never tell when you will get into legal trouble for creating a “tribute” app or using a person’s name/likeness, for any reason. So always consult with a lawyer before proceeding with any project that will attempt to do this. Just because unlicensed apps have managed to get published, does not mean that they will not get into trouble at some point.
Apple App Store
First, let’s look at the App Store keyword data for the keyword “tom brady” and find out how competitive it is. 
As you can see, there are only 26 apps that are ranking for this keyword. On top of that, there is an 87% chance that this totally unrelated app that we used for this study, could rank for the keyword.
So this keyword is not competitive at all. You will find that this is the case for a lot of celebrity names and brands…for reasons mentioned previously.
Another good reason for this, however, can be seen in the Search Score. If you don’t know what this is, it is simply Apple’s measure of how many relative searches an app gets. The scale supposedly goes from 0 to 100, but 5 is the smallest value at this time.
This could be a chicken/egg scenario, however. Since Tom Brady doesn’t have his own app, people aren’t searching for it. But this low Search Score shows that there isn’t a lot of existing demand for an app.
When we look at the top 10 apps that rank for this keyword, here is what we find.
So the top 4 apps are directly Brady related, but the rest are either related to New England, the NFL or soccer. None of them have a really high Visibility Score, so they are not very visible on the App Store.
Let’s take a look at the first two apps, BradyMoji and Patriots Sticker Blitz. They are actually officially licensed apps. The first app is licensed by NFL Players Inc. and the second is licensed by both the Players Association and Kraft Sports Productions LLC, the owners of the Patriots.
These are perfect examples of how almost any brand or celebrity can broaden their marketing and take advantage of stickers to easily get into the App Store.
The next two appear to be created by independent developers. I thought that Tom’s Gate of Deflation was funny. The game is super simple, but the developer managed to take advantage of the Deflategate incident that got Tom Brady suspended for four games…without actually mentioning him or the Patriots directly.
Google Play Store
Now let’s examine the Play Store. Here are the top 10 results for apps that come up for the keyword search for: “tom brady”
Like in the App Store, we see a mix of apps, from NFL apps to a card matching game. Nice job Miami Dolphins, your team did well this year and your app is riding the Super Bowl wave.
The “tom brady” keyword is considerably more competitive on the Play Store, with a 61 out of 100 Search Score (higher is more competitive). There are also 5X more apps that rank for this keyword.
The first app on this list is interesting. The publisher has created apps for several big sports stars, such as LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Mr. Tom Brady.
They list a college email address in their contact information. If this really is a college dorm development company and they do have permission to use these athletes’ names and pictures, then this is a huge win for them and goes to show what a small studio can do in the app world!
Tom Brady App Endorsements
You may not remember this, but Tom Brady has endorsed an app before. Back in 2014 he endorsed the now-defunct DailyMVP app.
Everyone was surprised when the app came out of nowhere with this viral ad.
Image credit: Fortune
According to the article, it took a long time for Daily MVP to get Brady on board. So if you ever want to get Tom Brady to endorse your app, take some notes from this article.
New England Patriots Apps
While we were at it, we decided to take a look at Patriots apps. One cool app that caught our eye was the NE Rewards app from Influence Mobile Inc.
It is an app that allows New England fans to play games, answer trivia and do other Patriots’ related activities, to earn free Patriots gear. That in itself isn’t revolutionary.
However, when you realize that there is an app for every single NFL team, then you realize that it’s pretty genius. Instead of having just one app for the entire NFL, they multiply their chances of people finding the app for their favorite team.
The Super Bowl Winner
But in terms of apps, which one won the Super Bowl? Well, there was one clear winner, the Fox Sports Go app.
They went from about 2,000 downloads a day, to over 50,000 downloads a day.
While only a small portion of the population supports the New England Patriots, There are tons of people who want to watch the game on their phones.
We saw a huge spike in estimated downloads inside Market Intelligence because the Fox Sports Go app was one place where you could watch the Super Bowl for free.
Conclusion
Glu is one company that has done an amazing job of creating successful celebrity apps. So if we ever see an official Tom Brady app, there is a good chance that Glu will get that contract.
But even if Tom Brady never comes out with his own app, we hope that you have learned how to examine the different aspects of a niche and find out what is working for app publishers and who the biggest winners are.
